Culture Magazine Debut + Birchrun Dinner

Alas, it’s here: the winter issue of Culture Magazine. It features my first story for the magazine, and I’m so pleased that it brings attention to a stellar blue-cheese maker from Pennsylvania, Sue Miller of Birchrun Hills Farm.

I interviewed Sue this fall and spent a day watching her make Birchrun Blue. Her attention to detail and her deep love of all things Holstein showed me something important that goes into cheesemaking besides milk and rennet: devotion. Deep, deep devotion to animals, land, and the people Sue calls her "eaters".

This issue of Culture feels like an album of greatest hits for me. The centerfold cheese is Rush Creek, from Uplands Cheese in my home state of Wisconsin. And the spread right after my story on Sue showcases Mike Geno’s cheese portraits (yup, that's one on the wall in the photo below). Mike’s been featured on this site many times. In fact, he often accompanies me on fromage junkets around the city.

Birchrun Hills Farm Dinner: Coincidentally, Philadelphia’s own Southwark restaurant has planned to honor Sue Miller with a Birchrun Hills Farm tasting dinner on Wednesday, Dec. 21, at 7 p.m. ($45). Chef Nick Macri has four incredible courses planned to feature Birchrun's cheese, whey-fed pork, and veal. Please join Mike Geno, Sue Miller, and me. Raw milk and cookies for dessert!

To reserve a spot at Southwark’s Birchrun Hills Dinner, call the restaurant at 215-238-1888.  

Puddle Duck Creek

My October cheese column in Grid Magazine features this pretty duckling, known as Puddle Duck Creek. It's a bloomy cheese from Hillacres Pride in Peach Bottom, PA. When I first picked up Puddle Duck at my local Green Aisle Grocery, I was struck by it's golden interior -- it looks like banana pudding. That's a good sign. As I mention in my column (see below), that gold coloring tells me that the cows were pasture-raised. Cows can't digest beta carotene in grass, so it shows up in the milk and subsequently in the cheese.

This is the first season I've seen Puddle Duck Creek. It's a great addition to the local cheese world -- dense and fudgy. It joins a couple other notable Brie-style cheeses from the area, namely Buttercup Brie, Noble Run, and Sue Miller's Little Chardy. If you live in the Philadelphia area, check out the Hillacres Pride stand at Headhouse Farmers Market. You'll see Sue Miller's Birchrun Hills Farm stand there, too. It would be fun to try her Little Chardy alongside Puddle Duck Creek since they're made from different breeds of grass-fed cows. Hillacres raises Jerseys, while Birchrun milks Holsteins.  

In fact, that's just what I might do this weekend.

If you find yourself with a puck of Puddle Duck, try serving it with cherry preserves and a sparkly wine or Duvel. You could also toast slices of Puddle Duck on top of baguette rounds and layer some sauteed mushrooms on top to pick up on the earthy notes. Add a sprinkle of chives, too.   

~

Below: A screen shot from the October issue of Grid Magazine, p. 13

 

A Hurricane Cheese Party

When you face blowing away, you want to be among friends. And so, last night, we invited the neighbors over for cheese in the face of Hurricane Irene. 

Just the day before, we’d driven out to Chester County, Monsieur Fromage and I, and we’d picked up some extraordinary wedges, so our larder was stocked with Sue Miller’s entire line of Birchrun Hills Farm cheeses. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing them all if the power went out and the fridge went dark.

Luckily, my neighbors dig the funk. Here’s how the storm of cheese and Irene went down.

6:30 p.m. The rain hits.

7:00 p.m. Madame Fromage sets the table.

7:30 p.m. Cheese lovers dash across the street for nourishment.

8:00 p.m. There is windswept salad, plenty of beer.

9:00 p.m. Our very own “storm catcher” receives texts on her Bad News Blackberry 

10:00 p.m. Loved ones ring. There are phonecalls in the foyer.

Midnight: I'm still thinking about Little Chardy, Sue's great Brie. 

4:00 a.m. The chimney falls in. The ceiling snaps.

10 a.m. I’m blogging, feeling lucky to have a roof and good friends, but I'm also wondering about the cows I met at Sue's farm two days ago, like Little Chardy (below), the namesake cow who inspired the great Brie we all consumed at the height of the storm. Little Chardy, you still there?

Yuletide Cheese Tasting, Dec. 10

Noble Road, Calkins Creamery (PA)

Darlings, isn’t it about time we sat down and ate cheese and drank beer together? On December 10, I am co-hosting an all-local cheese-travaganza with cheesemonger Paul Lawler at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market.

Paul is my go-to man for local cheese, and he has appeared on this blog, usually in the presence of cows or runny raw-milk treats. If you want dairy trivia, he is the man to call. He is also a whiz at pairing cheese and spirits.

Join us from 6:30 – 8 p.m. for a 5-course feast of farmstead cheeses from around Pennsylvania, along with local beer and accompaniments. We’ll feature the cheeses from my column in Grid this month, a two-page spread of dreamy delicacies, including the heart throb pictured above.

Tickets cost $35 and can be purchased at the Fair Food Farmstand. Seating is limited to 15. All proceeds benefit the Farmstand. Dig out your holiday sweater and come on down.

What: Yuletide Cheese Tasting

Where: Fair Food Farmstand

When: Dec. 10, 6:30-8 p.m.

Tickets: $35 in advance at the Farmstand

Hidden Hills Old Gold

Gouda is one of those cheeses that can be frightfully dull or wickedly good. I never buy a wedge without road-testing the wheel at the cheese counter. When it’s young, Gouda is mellow and buttery. Aged, it turns nutty and sweet. Cave-age it, and you’ve got musty madness. Too often though, it’s a khaki-pants cheese. Meh. Goes with everything, but doesn’t really jazz ya.

Here in Pennsylvania, Lori Sollenberger makes wonderful Gouda from the raw milk of her Jersey cows. Her herd is small -- only eight head. And Lori only makes Gouda during the summer months, when her girls are grazing on pasture. The Beta-carotene in the grasses imbues her cheese with a golden glow – check out that amazing color (no photoshop tricks, I swear). Her aged variety, which Lori nurses for a year, is called Old Gold. It’s sharp and bright with a twitch of caramel sweetness. Oh honey, no khaki Gouda here.

If you want to try some of Lori’s cheese and you live in Philly, put on your hot pants and trot down to Di Bruno Bros. Lori just sent the store a shipment. She also sent me a sample in the mail a couple weeks back, and I have been gnawing on this bright goodness for ohhh the last five nights. When I come home, I crave its sharpness -- it’s like caffeine.

To read more about Lori Sollenberger’s cheeses, check out my column in the October issue of Grid Magazine (p. 24). Her feta is another star.

Lori's cheese is available under the Hidden Hills Dairy label. Her dairy is licensed for raw milk, and she makes half a dozen cheeses, including Ivory Lace (a Havarti-style cheese) and Allegheny (made from wintertime whole milk). For anyone interested in seasonal cheeses, Hidden Hills is a great example of a small dairy that adapts its cheese recipes to the seasonal variations of its milk.

A Visit to Keswick Creamery

Cheesemongers are some of the nicest people in the world. In fact, I’m tempted to say that as a profession they do more to promote small farmers and artisans than just about anyone else in the food industry, except maybe chefs. Take Paul Lawler, a local cheesemonger I’ve gotten to know primarily through this blog. Last week, he invited me out to a dairy farm in Cumberland County, where he was “babysitting the cheese room” for a pair of cheesemakers. How many people do you know who will babysit a cheese room?

Paul, who works at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market, has advocated for Keswick Creamery over the last several months as this family farm struggles to stay afloat. Recently, the owners hatched a plan to raise some much-needed capital by offering shares of a dairy CSA. Paul, who interned at the creamery last year, wanted me to check out the operation so I could see, first hand, what goes into making quality raw-milk cheese. And he had a hunch I just might want to write about it.

Keswick has made a name for itself locally but also in D.C., where the creamery has a stand at the DuPont Circle Farmers’ Market. The creamery’s ricotta and quark (a dense, creamy wonder that spreads beautifully on bread) have gained favor with chefs and made headlines in the Washington Post. The Fair Food Farmstand and Greensgrow in Philly also carry these products. These small-batch cheeses are especially flavorful because Keswick cows graze on pesticide-free pastures in the Cumberland Valley. Happy cows make for excellent cheese. That’s a fact.

I got to meet some of these happy cows on Tuesday, when I rode out to the creamery for a tour of the cheese room with Paul. I’ll be honest, I’d never petted a cow before, and I was bowled over by how friendly these Jerseys were – Cappucino and I hit it off when she came over to lick my toes (painted blue, so can you blame her?), and soon Chai was nudging my arm, eager to be petted.

“Our cows love to be around people,” said Susan Dietrich, the farm’s matriarch and head milker. Her attention to these animals was more than a little touching; she knew all 48 cows by name. “That’s Freya,” she said at one point, “But her nickname is French Fry.”

I hung out with Paul and fed alfalfa to the calves. Then we set off to explore the cheese cave, which was really an old veal shipping container. It was lined with wheels of raw-milk beauties, from glowing rounds of cheddar-like Lesher to dark circles of something mysterious rubbed in grape must.

When we started tasting, it was easy to understand why Paul has stood by Keswick’s line. The Blue Suede Moo packed a spiky wallop that reminded me of Cabrales, and the Tomme Sweet Tomme had the addictive quality of a gorgeous Alpine melter. Best of all, though, was the ricotta that Paul made that day – pillowy and light, ethereal as cloudcover.

I left Keswick Creamery with a new appreciation for the farmstead cheesemaker. It takes work to milk 48 cows twice a day and a lot of extra care to turn that milk into cheese on site. At Keswick, that’s handled by just three people – Susan Dietrich and her daughter Melanie and son-in-law Mark. There’s no distribution manager or marketing guru like you’d find at a commercial cheese plant, which is why it takes a dedicated cheesemonger like Paul to make sure you hear about Keswick’s ricotta and ale-washed Mad Tomme (it’s washed in Mad Elf beer).

If you’re interested in supporting one of Pennsylvania’s farmstead cheesemakers, check out Keswick Creamery’s CSA program – for a small investment, you’ll receive baskets of cheese by mail over the next several seasons. The cheeses are unusually rich and tasty, rustic in a way that only raw-milk cheese tends to be. They’re also a taste of the lush life that 48 cows enjoy…and will, hopefully, continue to enjoy for years to come.

Cheddar Notes

Friends, I write to you from the state of Minnesota, where I plan to squirrel myself away for the next month to finish a novel. I've got a cooler full of cheese to sustain me, but internet access will be spotty, so consider this my postcard.

Madame Fromage will be back to talk cheese smack on July 1.

Pennsylvania Noble

The moldy month of October has really opened my eyes to the pleasure of a good rind. I had a quick tutorial a few weeks back with Bloomin’ Idiot, a smoldering, moldering cheese from Wisconsin, and I’ve been hooked on spores ever since. Consider the note on the label of Pennsylvania Noble, a cheddar-style cheese with a hardy outer jacket: “Toasted rind side up is delicious!”

Hell, I couldn’t wait to fire up the toaster oven tonight when I got home from a rainy day at work. I took the crust, sliced it right onto a baguette round, and, oh, what a melty treat I had. Even the dog was licking her lips.

Truth be told: I took this cheese to a little soiree last night hosted by our very persnickety Euro cheese friend, The Blue Cheese Brit -- a regular character in these posts. Being British, the BCB likes to stick his rosy nose up at domestic cheddars. So, I was pretty excited to watch his reaction when I slid my wedge of PA Noble – made of organic, raw milk from grass-fed cows – onto his cutting board.

Would the Brit bite?

Well, guess who exclaimed as he cut into it, “Ohhh, God, look how she breaks!”

PA Noble comes out of Green Valley Dairy in Lancaster County, where it was developed by a pair of Amish brothers keen to switch from hormone-amped cows to pasture-raised heifers. Now their cave-aged cheddar-style Noble (as they market it) is a hot ticket item. It’s won several national and local awards, and you’ll find it at ritzy bistros, like Django. I heard about it at the Fair Food Farm Stand in Reading Terminal Market, my fave source for local cheese.

PA Noble is marvelously sharp. It has the tangy claws of a cheddar, but it’s earthier…pasturey. The mouthfeel is smooth, though Noble is crumbly, and the sharp tweak at the end actually leaves your tongue a bit numb.

The label (which pictures a goofy cow in an Amish hat) should be obeyed: toast those rinds. It makes for a crisp-gooey, grandfather-ish snack. And if you’re ever invited by a British snob to a cheddar smack-down, this is just the eyebrow-raiser you’ll want to slide out of your back pocket.