Jakob's Bowl

Shuffle Off To Bufala...2

Armed with more information about the Gritti Brothers, I returned for more of the Casatica di Bufala a couple of days ago. With a little closer scrutiny of the cheese cases, I found three more of the water buffalo milk cheeses from the AZIENDA AGRICOLA GRITTI BRUNO E ALFIO in Lombardy. They converted their father’s cow dairy, Quattro Portoni, into a water buffalo dairy in 2001 and started making cheese in a serious way in 2004. I was able to taste their Blue di Bufala, Gran Bú, and Caciocavallo di Bufala that day.

The Gran Bú – Big Buffalo - is one of their newest cheeses, and their first made from raw milk. Made in the style of the firm Canestrato Pugliese, a firm cows milk cheese from the South of Italy, the twenty pound wheels are aged for at least eight months. The Gran Bú wasn’t quite as salty as the Canestrato or as heavy on the palate, but it did feel richer and touch sweeter. While not the most complex of aged raw milk cheeses, it is all around satisfying and quite delicious. The Caciocavallo di Bufala came next, right from the cold case. It’s based on the traditional Caciocavallo made throughout the South - aged cows milk cheeses, tied with a string and looking like small jugs. It had the rubbery texture of Caciocavallo, but it seemed very bland, and it was my least favorite of the Bufala cheeses. I hope to try it again, hopefully at room temperature. My final taste that day was the Blue di Bufala. It was quite tasty, sweet with a nice amount minerality, and loaded with a robust blue flavor, not my favorite blue profile, but good enough to buy a piece. I also bought a piece of the Gran Bú to go along with my Casatica.

When I got home and had more of the Blue, I decided that there was just too much blue mold. I checked the importer’s website, and the picture they had for the Blue was more lightly veined…the challenges of handmade cheese production. The next day, I found the Gritti Quadrello di Bufala (front row) at another cheese shop. It is their take on the traditional, cows milk Taleggio of Lombardy. I tasted a piece, and decided that it was too cold to proper fix on the flavor profile. I bought a piece anyway, and when I brought it to room temperature, it had a nice amount of flavor. If the Casatica is ‘milky,’ the Quadrello is ‘buttery,’ very buttery. It does not have the pungency or the ‘tacky’ texture of a mature Taleggio. I have tasted ‘young’ Taleggio, and I suspect that the Quadrello is being sold before it is truly ready. I believe that a few more Gritti cheeses may have made it to our shores, so I will keep looking and tasting.

Shuffle Off To Bufala

I still remember the first time I had authentic Mozzarella di Bufala less than 24 hours after it was made, the flavor and texture of the oozing mass were revelatory. Unfortunately, then came 9/11 and the price tag included a round trip ticket to Naples. Ever since that time, whenever I found myself trying to enjoy the faded flavor of ‘fresh’ Mozzarella di Bufala that was at least a week old, I wondered why buffalo milk wasn’t used to make other cheese styles in Italy, or if it was, why they never made it to this country. Although I no longer remember the details, a few years back I did taste an aged buffalo milk cheese, one that didn't rise above the level of 'nice.'

Well, It seems that others have had the same thought, specifically Bruno and Alfio Gritti in Cologno al Serio, Bergamo in the northern Italian region of Lombardy – yes, Lombardy. They have been producing about twenty different styles of cheese from pasteurized buffalo milk since 2006. At least four of their cheeses have now made it to this country, including a Blue, a Tallegio style, an aged cheese in the style of Canestrato Pugliese, and the Casatica di Bufala pictured here that I found a few days ago. It is made in the style of a traditional Bergamasco stracchino, a doughy rectangular paving brick with a bloomy rind. The paste is smooth and creamy and almost spreadable at room temperature. All of the expected Bufala flavors are there, and while they are more intense, there are no roughedges. It has a sweet milky richness with the telltale Bufala tanginess that slowly builds on the finish. I think it would be perfect for a late summer Caprese sandwich. I gobbled down this hunk in short order, and I’ll regularly be going back for more.

Mountina From Mountana

I found this cheese two Saturdays ago at Steve’s Cheese in Portland. 'Mountina' sounded a bit corny, and its producer 'The Vintage Cheese Company' didn’t sound like a mom and pop farm with a herd of 10 Holsteins. Just as importantly, Montana wasn’t exactly the land of small sustainable farming, but there wasn’t much in the case by way of American Artisan cheeses, so I decided to give it a try. Steve cut pieces for me and a Swiss gent - he was a cheese importer actually - and we both tasted. While its flavor profile was fairly simple, it was totally delightful, a touch sweet and very fruity with a bit of nuttiness on the finish. Steve compared it to an Appenzeller, but I had to agree with my tasting companion, it tasted more like a young Emmental - the fruitiness and minimal sharpness were the 'tell' for me.This will make one hell of a grilled cheese sandwich. Sometimes simple is better even with cheese.

The next day, I stopped in at the bi-annual open house for Provvista, Portland’s premier food importing and distribution company, and low and behold there behind a table piled high with cubes of Mountina stood Dwayne and Darryl Heap third generation cheese makers and owners of the Vintage Cheese Company. In 2009, 15 years after selling their grandfather’s cheese company, they decided to get back into the game. They were buying their milk from local dairy farmers, mainly Holstein and Jersey herds, but they were planning on eventually establishing their own herd, and Ayrshire cows are high on their list…talk about serendipity.

How Now...Brown Cow?

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows - and china.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Sally Jackson’s cheeses were some of the first Washington cheeses, I enjoyed when I moved here to Seattle in the late 1990s. She produces mainly aged, mold-ripened, leaf wrapped sheep and goat cheeses out on their farm in near the Canadian border in North Central Washington. They were good enough to be mentioned in Steve Jenkins, best selling Cheese Primer back in 1996. Her cheeses were a revelation to me, and I remember buying as much as I could afford at the time whenever I could find them - there were often long periods of scarcity here in Seattle. Although I am more partial to sheep and goat cheeses, I remember being amazed and excited the first time I saw her cow’s milk cheese - I didn’t even know she made one. Wrapped in chestnut leaves, the semi-soft paste was a brilliant yellow, and the combination of its creamy texture and aromatic flavor was otherworldly. I believe that she only had one Guernsey cow at the time, so its scarcity was understandable.

Well, her milking herd has expanded to three cows over the years, two Guernseys (Lola and Camille) and one Swiss Brown (Renata). While her delicious goat’s milk and sheep’s milk cheeses are now offered more often here in Seattle, her cow’s milk cheese is somewhat of rarity. I stumbled onto a few wheels at a local market some weeks ago, and without hesitation, I ordered a piece. The woman working behind the cheese counter told me that Renata, Sally’s Swiss Brown, was producing milk again after having ingested bits of metal while grazing a while back, and the chestnut leaf wrapped wheels they were offering were made from Renata’s milk. This was the reason that the paste was a much paler yellow than I remembered. While not as ‘fat’ on the palate as I remembered, the cheese seemed even more aromatic, verging on ‘stinky’ and pungent where the outer surface of the cheese met the leaves – what a treat!

You Lose Some...You Win Some…

One of my reasons for heading down to Portland this past weekend was to stock up on some Square Peg Farm pork, produced from their pasture raised hogs. Since I only visit the Saturday Farmers’ Market once or twice a month, I’m bound to miss a few things, and sure enough when I got to the Square Peg farm booth, there was no pork to be found, a one-week hiatus. As I was making my rounds my momentary annoyance subsided as I snapped up some great tasting golden tomatoes, huge Jimmy Nardello peppers, and a nice supply of Cheddar cauliflower. My final stop is usually the Juniper Grove Farm booth to buy some simple and satisfying Farmer’s cheese. Some of their fresh and bloomy rind cheeses are fairly well distributed in the Pacific Northwest, but their Farmer’s Cheese and some of their other aged cheeses are only available at the Portland Farmers’ Market.

This week they had a very pleasant surprise for me, their Gruyère by Goat. It’s a dense, alpine style cheese made with their unpasteurized goats’ milk, and they only make a small amount of it, typically once a year. I first tasted it at the Portland cheese festival in October 2007, and I was blown away by it. When I returned about three weeks later it was gone for the year, and my timing during 2008 and 2009 was off, so I haven’t had it in almost three years. It was as good as I remembered it, and I bought an entire pound! Since goats’ milk doesn’t have the same fat and protein make up of cows’ milk, the texture isn’t exactly like a cows’ milk alpine cheese, but still it has a much more pliable texture than a goat tome. It has a nice nuttiness, a tangy bite on the finish, and the pleasant, lingering aftertaste typical of well made aged goat cheese. It is a perfect accompaniment to a big, rustic red like Charbono, Alicante Bouschet, Cahors, or even a Rasteau Village, assuming you can find one under 14% alcohol these days. I’m almost tempted to drive back down this weekend to buy even more.

Am I Blue?...& Stinky

Last weekend in Portland I ran across cheeses from Wisconsin from Hook’s Cheese, a cheese maker that I was unfamiliar with. This really didn’t surprise me since most artisan cheese gets consumed in the region of its production. However, when I got home and found out that they had been making cheese since 1976, and winning awards for many of them, I was a bit embarrassed. On the other, had I done my research first, I may never have even bothered to taste the cheese. I generally avoid cheese makers that make a lot of different European style cheeses, especially if they don’t have any cows of their own to milk. Hook’s produces somewhere around forty different cheeses, including nine ‘flavored’ cheeses, an even bigger ‘no no,’ for me.

I was in Steve’s Cheese’s new location, The Cheese Bar, waiting to taste more of the Tails & Trotters hazelnut finished prosciutto, and I decided to taste a few cheeses. I saw two different blue cheeses from Hook’s, Tilston Point Blue and Hook’s Blue, both made from cows’ milk, - not my first, or second, choice of milk for blue cheese - but I thought I would give at least one a try. The cheese monger described the difference between the two, and the fact that the Tilston Point Blue was also washed to develop a fuller flavor cinched it for me. Stinky, washed rind cheeses are much higher on my list of favorites than most blue cheeses, so the concept of a stinky, washed blue cheese excited me. The pungent, warm flavor and creamy texture were a revelation, and so I bought a small piece.

Hook’s makes their cheeses in Mineral Point, in southwestern Wisconsin. Unfortunately, their website isn’t very informative, and so there isn’t a lot I can tell you about the details of the Tilston Point Blue’s production. Tilston is an anagram for Stilton and the cheese is an homage to that great English cheese, and one they can be proud of. The cheese is made from pasteurized milk purchased from local, small-holding dairy farmers who raise their herds in a sustainable fashion, but it isn’t clear what breeds are involved. The Tilston Point Blue is aged for a year and washed, but it’s unclear what they wash it with. - the exterior of the wheel is coated in an orange-brown stickiness. They obviously learned quickly, since they’ve only been making blue cheese since 1997.

The bottom line is that the flavor and texture of this cheese seems to combine the best of both world’s, blue and washed-rind. Stinky, smooth, and creamy, it has a enticing warmth on the finish - think Alsatian Muenster without the bitter finish. While many reviews refer to a nutty flavor, for me, it comes across as toasted pumpkin seed. It is positively addictive…bravo!