Valentine’s Cheese Advice

With the economy in the toilette, it’s an awfully good year to be a loving spendthrift. Instead of bedazzling a sweater and going out on the town, I suggest you bedazzle some goat cheese and stay in with some Steely Dan.

It’s as easy as picking up these chevre hearts—available at the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal—or making your own. Come on, you can find some fresh goat cheese and figure out how to press it between sheets of waxed paper for some easy molding. Pete Demchur of Shellbark Hollow rolls his cuties in fresh lavender buds and pink peppercorns, but you could roll yours in some paprika, craisins, or za'atar. That a grrrl, Martha.

Below, I've listed all the scrumptious sides you could ever want for a lover’s cheese board. Pick up some goat cheese, a weepy Brie, and a sweet hunk of Valdeon, then lock the door. Turn off all the lights, scramble for a candle, and feed your naughty cherub these tender morsels:

• Cherry preserves
• Spiced pecans
• Dark chocolate
• Honey
• Dates
• Baguette
• Champagne

Don’t forget to relax the cheese! What I mean is: while you’re taking a warm bath, leave the cheeses on the counter. You'll want to serve them at room temperature. Otherwise this whole exercise is pointless.

Cheese & Champagne Class: Bone up on the finer points of serving bubbly and Brie at a Cheese & Champagne Class at Di Bruno Bros., 1730 Chestnut St., on Friday, Feb. 10, at 6:30 p.m. The swarthy Richard-Luis Morillo will demo and discuss. Tickets: $20. For more info, call 215-665-1659 and ask for "Catering."

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

 

Close Encounters With Coulommiers

Certain cheeses, like certain rare albums, attract die-hard fans. You’re looking at one here. I would show you others if I weren’t just a wee bit worried about getting caught. See, the cheese pictured before you isn’t actually legal, and that’s because it’s unpasteurized. It came into this country, like so many pirated Michael Jackson cassette tapes, via a suitcase.

I’ve always wanted to try a raw-milk French Brie, which is why I biked to an undisclosed parking lot several weeks ago and did the unthinkable: I ate raw Coulommiers out of the trunk of an unmarked minivan. It’s just as nefarious as it sounds. There were knives, illicit cutting boards, cheese thugs.

I risked my life. And I’d do it again.

Coulommiers is a cow’s milk cheese from near Burgundy – an area of the world that is known for its glorious dairy. Epoisses? From Burgundy. Delice de Bourgogne? From Burgundy. Both  are sold to the U.S. as pasteurized cheeses because of our stringent raw-milk laws. They’re very good cheeses, mind you, but as a diehard cheeselover, one has to wonder: what would the raw-milk version taste like?  

This is why I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try raw Coulommiers – the real deal from France. If I’d been in Paris, I would have shmeared it on a baguette without hesitation, without looking over my shoulder, without first putting on a Lone Ranger mask. 

I wouldn’t even be telling you about this experience except that…well, I feel I owe it to you. I mean, we have come so far together.

So here is my close encounter with Coulommiers: Imagine the taste of a thousand splendid mushrooms, sautéed in butter and herbs to silky perfection. Envision the crepe-de-chine creaminess on the tongue, the pasturey aroma of wet hay. Multiply this by 10,000 flashing taste buds and you have, well, a cheese supernova.

I am here to tell you that this Coulommiers was so far from every other gummy, slightly furry, tongue-coating Brie experience I’ve ever endured, that I literally moonwalked across cobblestones and fell into a planter pot, stunned.

I am ruined, reader. If you ever go to France, order Coulommiers. Make sure to get a ripe one. If it doesn’t run down your sleeve, step away and move to the next cheese shop.

And if you ever get a phonecall in the middle of the night from someone with a husky voice who says, “Meet me in a parking lot tomorrow at 2 p.m. I have some dangerous, irresistible French cheese,” please let me know. I will go in your place. 

Note: This post is not intended to advocate cheese smuggling. Raw milk cheese is legally available for purchase in the U.S., but it must be at least 60 days old. Young cheeses, such as Brie and Coulommiers, ripen in a few short weeks so they are not available in stores as raw cheeses. It is legal to eat them, just not to buy them. 

Pierre Robert

I’ve never been a brie freak, probably because brie is the hummus of English departments, and I overloaded on it at mixers during grad school. So often brie is rubbery, flavorless – glue on toast. I almost never buy it unless I am hosting people I don’t know well, then I figure it will be a pleaser.

Today, however, I took a whole wheel of Pierre Robert, a French triple-crème, into my Fiction Workshop – an exceptionally good class this year. I felt it was time to induct these 15 students into the world of cheese now that they’re seniors. And, come on, eating brie is an English major’s rite of passage. I wanted them to sample the good stuff.

Pierre Robert was recommended to me by a local cheese maven, and her recommendation was spot on. I’ve been reading a lot about Brillat-Savarin lately (also a triple crème), which I’ll be serving this Saturday at my first public tasting. From everything I’ve read, Brillat-Savarin is body butter – rated #2 sexiest cheese in my Murray’s Cheese Handbook. So, I was curious to see how Pierre Robert compared.

Mmmm…it was decadent. Pierre Robert has the texture of a mousse, dense and yet light. The rind melted on my tongue – not the least bit rubbery. And the flavors were more potent than I’d imagined, grassy and peppery. I’m still a stink-bomb lover – the blues have it – but I will buy the Pierre Robert again, for picnics, for hot-night desserts. Bring on the champagne, or, as one artisanal cheese site recommended: Tequila Sunrises.

My students definitely passed the brie test. Honestly, I thought they’d find the mold off-putting, but they descended on this snow-white cake like a pack of writers, which is to say, like wolves! Even the box went out the door under one person’s arm. So, I guess there will have to be more cheese inductions for senior English majors. Maybe I’ll work up to a salty wedge of tongue-numbing Cabrales.

My mind is working on a list of cheese-and-writer pairings – hmm…what cheese would go well with Joyce Carol Oates?