Sparkenhoe Red Leicester

 

With a name like Sparkenhoe, you know you are in for tradition. This golden cheese originated in 1754, when an English farmer began naming his bold-colored wheels after his prize bull, Old Sparkenhoe.

 

Today, the recipe lives on. Since 2005, the Clark family of Leicester, England has been making Sparkenhoe the old-fashioned way, using raw milk from pasture-raised cows and natural orange coloring from the Annatto plant. To read more, please click here.

Full disclosure: This post is part of a series I'm writing for Di Bruno Bros., one of my fave cheese haunts in Philly. The deal is, I get paid to guest-blog for the store's site (dibruno.blogspot.com) on Wednesdays. I choose each topic myself.

Tomme de Linden Dale

This month, I wrote about Tomme de Linden Dale for my cheese column in Grid. Seeing this photo reminds me that I need to hustle down to the Rittenhouse Farmers’ Market to pick up another wheel. Cheesemaker Andrew Mellinger only sells his goat Tomme on Saturdays, and he’s got a batch of raw goat Tomme that should be available about now.

This is such a lovely cheese – it has the most divine smell, like yeast and white grapes. The taste reminds me a little bit of Ossau Iraty, a Spanish sheep cheese with the same dense paste and olivey, nutty notes. Tomme de Linden Dale is fruitier, though, which makes it a beautiful cheese for serving alongside Asian pears.

I happen to love the hand-drawn label on this cheese – a wise, old goat wearing a monocle. I’m guessing it was sketched by one of Mellinger’s six children. They’re all involved in the family goat farm in Ronks, PA – the same farm where Mellinger grew up. Cheese doesn’t get any more farmstead than this.

 

Linden Dale Farm is a small operation. No website. No retail outlets. If you come across a wheel at a market around Pennsylvania, nab one. It’s an undiscovered beauty, and it keeps well. I just finished the last bite this week, and I bought this wheel back in August.

If you want to check out other farmstead goat Tommes, consider Elk Mountain or Twig Farm Tomme. Both are aged goat cheeses with natural rinds. Rustic. Fabulous. 

Wisconsin Cheese Coma

In the last 72 hours, I have eaten umpteen kinds of cheese and visited seven cheesemakers around Wisconsin. My 3-day media tour was fascinating, and the thing that stands out at this moment – as I detox on my brother’s couch – is that cheese plants, like cheese itself, are imbued with a kind of terroir.

At Roth Kase in Monroe, I took away an impression of impeccable cleanliness and regime. It’s a place where high-tech robots pass through dimly lit aging rooms, flipping wheels of cheese. And each employee wears a pair of white Crocs that never leave the building. Thousands of cheeses are made here, including gorgeous Gruyere and Buttermilk Blue, thanks to immaculate systemization.

At Uplands, home to the nationally reknowned Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Mike Gingrich and Andy Hatch stand around in ballcaps, surrounded by blue ribbons. They make one cheese (a second will be released soon), and the vibe is mellow, the plant a single pole-barn building. Gingrich and Hatch are so finely attuned to their cheese, they can tell how the wheels are ripening just by smelling the air when they open the door of the aging room. No robots here. No white Crocs. The plant is as serene as the sloped hills surrounding it.

Cheesemaker Mike Gingrich, giving a tour

But my favorite plant, the one that lives on in my mind, is Carr Valley in tiny LaValle. This 100-year old plant looks like a gas station in the middle of a corn field – it’s got a pop machine out front and a kitschy gift shop full of snow globes and bells. Walk into the “make room,” though, and you feel history. Sunlight streams through windows onto ancient-looking forms and presses, and the pasteurizer lingers in the corner like a giant squid haunting a bioluminescent reef. 

Something about the light makes me think of a Hopper painting or a reading room, full of newspapers, turning color with age. If a cheese plant can convey a sense of place, or terroir, as the French call it, Carr Valley does just that. I will never eat their squeaky curds without feeling a pang of nostalgia. 

Notes from a Cheese Media Tour

Dear Diary,

I love a plush bus. I had no idea how nice it would be to travel by leather-lined coach, until I set foot in Wisconsin this week to join my first Cheese Media Tour. Thanks to the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, I am riding across the Plains with about 20 bloggers and print journalists from across the country, eating cheese and meeting cheesemakers.

Here are a few highlights so far:

Fresh mozzarella at Crave Brothers', a dairy powered by a "manure digester."

Here are the cow barns by night: 1,000 snoozing bovines. Those lights? That's the manure digester at work!

This is George Crave, who looks like Sting. In a way, he is a rock star.

George Crave's show cow shrine. His current "beauty" is on top.

George and Debbie Crave treated us to a fabulous farmstead meal that included a beautiful cheese plate of their Petit Fere (a washed rind) and mascarpone -- which Debbie served with homemade cranberry sauce and ginger snaps.

I learned a few things about raising dairy cows. Each Holstein eats 100 lbs. of feed per day -- at Crave Brothers', they eat a combination of pasture grass, corn silage, alfalfa, and soybean meal. I also learned that George Crave realllly likes cows.

"If I weren't at this dinner, I'd be out in the barn, with my boots on, looking at the cows," he told me at dinner. When I asked what he meant, George told me he loves to look for show cows, which he enters into contests. Past contestants have included Glamor, Gracious, Linen, and, most recently, Asia.

"I like cheese," George said, "But I really like cows. At night, Debbie likes to read Bon Appetit, and I read Select Sires."

I couldn't have asked for a better evening.

Richard-Luis Morillo: Cheesemonger

Hometown: Bayside, Queens and North Merrick, Long Island

His specialty: I deal with a lot of our affinage, especially of the washed rinds. Affinage is essentially cheese care at its highest form.

His cheese of the moment: Muffato, a Northern Italian blue coated in mint, chamomile, and marjoram leaves. At first I thought it was gimmicky, but it’s a nice example of synthesis in a blue. To read more, please click here.

Full disclosure: This post is part of a paid series I write for Di Bruno Bros., one of my fave cheese haunts in Philly. I choose the topic, and the posts run on the store's blog.

My Cheese Crush

The highlight of last week? A Twitter follow from Max McCalman. I know, I know, it’s very high school. But I squealed like a truffle-hunting piglet because Max McCalman is a truffle, as far as food writers go – the rare combination of connoisseur and wordsmith. His opus, Mastering Cheese, just happens to be my most thumbed-through book in the house.

Here’s a typical evening: I root through the crisper for my wedge du jour. Is that a hunk of Keen’s Cheddar from my photo shoot, I ask myself, staring at something dodgy in Saran, or is that the Quickes Cheddar I sampled last week? Hmmm… I better consult with Max.

You see, Max has a cheddar lexicon on page 90.

Then I’ll begin to pour a glass of wine -- but no, I should really see what Max recommends. Maybe I’ll open a beer. Or, could this go with whisky?

You see, Max has a sickeningly useful cheese-and-beer pairing chapter, starting on page 244.

Then I’ll flop onto the couch, but wait…is Max pairing mango with blue cheese in that cheese board on page 354? I never thought of that. Mmm, I think I have a mango. No, I better go get a mango. I need to eat Rogue River Blue with mango right now.

So, I head for the market, Max’s book in hand, and at a red light the car lurches a little and flips open to a section on terroir, which I read hungrily until the guy behind me honks, and then I continue onto the store…where, of course, I have to sit in the parking lot to look up the Iberian tasting plate, because now I’m thinking I should just have a few people over.

And then the street lamps flicker on, and it starts to rain, and I’m standing in the parking lot with Max McCalman’s book, and the ink starts to run, and I think, I should really just wait to shop in New York at Max’s place, Artisanal. And so I get back into the car, and drive home to my morsel of dodgy cheese in Saran, which I eat in bed with a glass of cheap wine while reading Max’s chapter on “Champion Cheddars.” And I’m perfectly happy.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. A good book and a hunk of cheese. And now, a little brush with greatness. If I were still in high school, I would be drawing big cave-aged hearts all over my unicorn notebook.

Philadelphia Slow Food Festival, Oct. 3

Amazing Acres Goat Cheese

This weekend, Slow Food will host its biannual Terre Madre celebration in Turin, Italy – the artisanal food extravaganza to end all. I’ve wanted to go since the Slow Food movement first captured my attention a decade ago; it was the subject of my first national feature story, and it appeared in Utne Reader.

This Sunday, I’m excited to be part of a local Slow Food festival here in Philadelphia at World Café Live. The celebration takes place from noon-3 p.m., and it’s a chance for locals to drink Dock Street beer, hear live music, and sample artisanal foods from around the region.

Don’t ask me how I got nabbed to give a cheese demo. I don’t make cheese, but I do enjoy spreading dairy literacy and matchmaking for cheesemakers to meet potential cheese lovers. That’s why I invited Debbie Mikulak of Amazing Acres Dairy to join me. She hand-makes some of my fave goat cheeses, including a brandy-soaked, leaf-wrapped cake of Banon that Craig LaBan just featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer as his cheese ‘o the month. (Hats off to you, C.L.)

If you live in Philly, join me on Sunday. Debbie and I will be hosting a cheese demo from 12:30-1 p.m. I will be turning cartwheels amid live goats, while Debbie describes her cheese-making process. I’ve also got PA cheese maps to pass out, along with a list of must-try local cheeses.

If you read this blog, come up and say hi. I’ll give you an extra fat sample.

Tickets to the Slow Food festival at World Café Live cost $10 online and $15 at the door.