A sensational value wine made by respected Trevor Jones in the Barossa Valley in South Australia. This dessert wine is a blend averaging 46 years in age with a light to medium ruby color. Flavors of caramel, butterscotch, maple syrup, hazelnuts, raisins with a distinct earthiness on the palate. Aromas of roasted marshmallows and caramel on the nose with a nice, long finish. At this price point, it simply blows the competition away while offering plenty of pleasure. With the higher alcohol content (18%), you only need a little for a perfect pairing with our double cream cow’s milk cheese, Green Hill. Can keep up to a month if stored in your refrigerator. Number 70 on the Wine.com top 100 wines of 2007.
Green Hill $9 each
Green Hill is our pasteurized, soft-ripened, cow’s milk cheese. A Camembert-style, bloomy-rinded cheese, Green Hill is the shining star of the Sweet Grass Dairy line. We have received numerous awards for this cheese including two first place finishes at the American Cheese Society Annual Competitions in 2007 and 2008. Our success is rooted in our grass-based milk. Our artisan modes of production and use of double cream milk yield a thin rind with a rich, unctuous paste and a sweet, buttery flavor.
The Tasting Notes of the Pairing
This is the perfect answer to either offering a cheese course or dessert course at your next dinner party. The sweet and bold caramel flavors of the port will fulfill anyone that has to finish on a dessert note, and the creamy, buttery flavors of the Green Hill will satisfy anyone that loves a good cheese course. Neither one of these overpowers the other, but both allow the other to shine. The earthiness in the Jonesy is really accented by the grassy flavors in the Green Hill. As a food columnist in Chicago pointed out, this pairing is like snuggling up with your softest blanket in your favorite chair in front of a fire. It’s all about comfort!
Come to the Marketplace to taste our most popular cheese Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm.
Happy New Year! We are starting off this year with a resolution to write regular posts on our blog. This should not be hard as I love to talk (write) and spread the word about things that I am most passionate about–FOOD! This week I would like to brag a little bit about my newest obsession: Dreaming Cow Creamery Yogurt. Made by my brother and sister-in-law, Kyle and Janelle Wehner, in Pavo, this all natural product has no stabilizers, no additives, and is non-homogonized. My three sons and I just cannot get enough of the velvety texture and tangy, sweet flavor. We’ve been eating it with Hot Bread Kitchen’s Granola for breakfast and snack on a regular basis. Besides the flavor, the best part is that it is made with grass based milk from my parents’ dairy. Grass based dairy has also been shown to have higher levels of conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs) as well as Vitamin A, Beta Carotene and Omega-3s.
So, come into the Marketplace and taste their three flavors–Natural, Vanilla Agave, and Honey–to see which one you like the best.
$1.50 each
Week Pack: 5 for $7.00
The above quote, by Victorian economist and journalist Walter Bagehot, perhaps surmises the mentality of the British that led them to create Cheddar. Good things don’t come easy and that includes Cheddar. I only can imagine that the methods to make Cheddar were the ego-driven work of a nasty bet between a Frenchman and a Brit. Maybe the Frenchman taunted the Brit that he could not make a cheese to rival those of the Franks. Whatever the circumstances, the British rose to the challenge and created a cheese that is both ubiquitous and foreign to us Americans. Cheddar is certainly the most familiar of cheeses for Americans, but those orange shrink-wrapped blocks are so far removed from what the British call Cheddar. The real thing more closely resembles Parmigiano-Reggiano and in guidelines set forth by Neal’s Yard Dairy in England, there are requirements to what can be called “Cheddar.” Those requirements are that raw milk be used, traditional (veal) rennet is used to set the milk, the curd is hand-milled, and the cheeses are cloth-wrapped or “bandaged.” It also requires that Cheddar be made in Somerset County, but we’ll skip that one.
I had my first opportunity to make Cheddar last week when we realized we needed a batch of Clayburne (our Cheddar) for our Christmas boxes (when things need to age for several months, it’s hard not to think of the holidays months in advance). I had been threatened with this prospect since I began my apprenticeship a year ago. “Oh just wait until we make Clayburne…” Jeremy would say. Feliciano would shudder at it’s mention. Could it be that bad? Yes and no. Having made it now, I can see why we only make this once a year. In order for us to make Clayburne, we go through all the normal processes- culturing, renneting, cutting, stirring and where we would normally begin molding- we decided to extend the cheesemaking process for about two hours. First difference was that we drained all the whey out of the vat and pushed the curd up to the sides of the vat. After the acidity reached a certain point, we divided the curd into even slabs and began the cheddaring process. Cheddaring is the act of stacking the curd slabs onto each other so they continue to press whey out of the curd. Again we waited for the acidity to drop and once it hit its mark, we began to mill the curd. This is the crazy part and what distinguishes the good from the bad. There are machines that mill and make life easier, but they also make tasteless cheese. We choose to hand-mill, possibly because we don’t possess the milling machine, but more likely because we have some reverence for the way they did it in the olde days. Milling is basically taking the huge cheddared slabs and cutting them up into 3/4 inch cubes. After the curd is milled, it is salted and we get a delicious little snack of fresh cheese curds before we shovel the curd into bandaged molds. The bandages are there to keep the mold off the cheese. The process is finally wrapped up when we toss the finished molds onto the press for 72 hours! This is significant- most of our cheeses hang out on the press for a few hours max.
Speaking of wrapping things up. Tomorrow is my last day at the dairy. I’m moving to New York City to get a taste for the flip-side of the business, working for Saxelby Cheesemongers. Before I do that though, I’m headed off to the 25th American Cheese Society Conference where hopefully Sweet Grass will sweep up the competition. We have entered a bounty of cheeses to be judged and I’m confident we have some winners, for which I’ve played a part. Regardless of the outcome, I’ve taken great pleasure at the opportunity to have had this apprenticeship. Many people thought I was crazy to leave Chicago for Southern Georgia to make cheese and a great many more thought I wouldn’t be able to hack it. More than all the things I’ve learned about cheese and farming, the most important thing I’m taking away from this experience is that you can do anything if you want it badly enough. To quote another Brit, Winston Churchill once said “a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Sweet Grass is a testament to this philosophy. We’ve had our share of our difficulties this year- here’s to hoping for a sweet finish in Chicago!
A lot of food bloggers have posted in recent days, annoyed with an article that appeared in the New York Times by Kim Severson about recipe “deal breakers.” A deal breaker can be a technique, ingredient, or tool that can cause you such frustration that you give up all hope and order take-out Chinese instead. Severson cited obvious deal breakers from recipes that required “wild boar from hills surrounding Sante Fe,” “48 tender young grapevine leaves,” and “fillet and butterfly 12 4-inch anchovies.” But she also spoke with so-called cooks who won’t truss chickens, deep-fry- or char bell peppers. Come on, I can find any excuse to deep-fry. All I’m going to say is that a recipe is a guideline and can be manipulated to accommodate obscure ingredients, level of skill, and lack of proper equipment. EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF MAKING CHEESE! A recipe must be followed as written- the slightest deviation can yield a totally different product. This is why I spent 9 hours last Monday making haloumi.
It happened so innocently. “Wouldn’t it be great if we made haloumi?” I said to Jeremy, “it’s summer, time for grilling, we could sell it for Fourth of July.” “Sure, you can make haloumi if you want,” he responded with a look on his face that yelled SUCKER! I had no idea what I was getting into. The recipe seemed simple enough. I would first pasteurize, then culture, set with rennet, cut, stir, mold, press, press again, cut large blocks up into small 3 inch squares, reheat reserved whey to 180 degrees, cook squares in whey for 1 hour until they floated, pull cheese out of steaming hot whey bath and set out on draining table to cool for 20 minutes, then sprinkle with salt, and brine the following morning! Got all that? Everything was going great until I had to fish roughly 50 pounds of haloumi out of the extremely hot whey with a colander you might use for draining pasta. Obviously I am missing some proper equipment. What the recipe neglected to let me know is that I would need an electric pressure washer, an extremely caustic soap, and a hell of a lot of elbow grease to clean the tank after all was said and done. When I reheated the whey, albumin proteins coagulated making ricotta, which was a sweet bonus, but it also melted to the sides of the cheese vat. Jeremy walked in at this point to find me muttering all kinds of profanities under my breath as I wielded the pressure washer like some kind of vigilante cheesemaker. “If I ever suggest we make haloumi again, remind me of this moment,” I said. However, I had yet to taste my wares. A few days later I hauled my charcoal grill and some haloumi to the Lake Ella Farmer’s Market where I grilled up some skewers with delicious tomatoes from Turkey Hill Farm. Amazing!
So was making haloumi a deal breaker after all? No. I definately don’t want to make this all the time, but that’s probably why this tastes so good. All of the steps were necessary to yield the end product, which was delicious and worth all the sweat, cursing and extra scrubbing. Sometimes the deal breaker can actually be the deal maker!
Aaah! There is nothing like waking up early on Sunday morning and scraping mold off the rinds of blue cheese! But duty calls and this batch of Asher Blue is perfect at two months and it needs a little extra care to stay that way. Making a great blue cheese has been a goal of Jeremy and I’s since I got here and not to say it’s been difficult so much as confusing. For the longest time we had problems developing the characteristic blue veins. Some batches turned out and some grew other things inside where the holes were pierced. We’ve especially had a problem with a pesky surface mold, Geotrichum Candidum. It’s no suprise that it’s lurking in our cheese room, we utilize it for our bloomy rind cheese like Lumiere and Green Hill. But we certainly don’t want it in our Asher Blue for a simple reason. Geotrichum Candidum, like other surface molds has a short life and begins to break down after a month or two, depending on conditions in the environment such as temperature and humidity. Once G. Candidum starts to break down, the white bloomy rind turns orange and produces aromas of ammonia. Needless to say, not very appetizing and with this in mind, is why we eat cheeses like Brie and Camembert after a few weeks instead of a few months. To make a long story short, blue cheese requires a longer ripening time- usually 4 months, so to have something growing inside that is going to break down and produce acrid flavors before said product is ready is problematic. But as I said before, some batches turned out and some didn’t. There are other factors at stake! One is the cooler we store the cheeses in. We have multiple coolers, they are old refrigeration truck bodies we converted into “caves.” It struck me a while back that cheeses coming out of cooler #5 were more prone to having G. Canidum than cheeses from cooler #3. Mind you, the answer is a hunch because I have no way to actually prove this. Cooler #5 used to house our bloomy-rind cheeses and my guess is that it has inoculated itself into the environment. Cooler #3 has only housed big wheels, none of which utilize G. Candidum and thus Asher Blue is safe in this environment. It’s strange to think although the coolers are maybe 15 feet apart, they are two totally seperate environments with their own diverse mixture of molds, funghi and yeasts. If you are more curious about this subject, I recommend you rent The Cheese Nun, available through Netflix. Sister Noella Marcellino is a Geotrichum Candidum nut, having spent two years roaming France and studying the biodiveristy of the G. Canidum strain! The film culminates with a trip to the American Cheese Society’s Annual Competition, which is where we are headed in July. This particular batch of Asher Blue will be in tow, as will Titan and our heavy hitter, Green Hill. Here’s to hoping for a big win! And a last side note, if you are itching for another food blog, please check out http://anicca3.blogspot.com/. John Bowers is as passionate about BBQ as I am about cheese and I sent him some a while back, so check regularly to see what he comes up with! Also, be on the lookout for a post about the trials and triumphs of making Haloumi!
Sorry folks for dropping the ball on the washed-rind cheese. What can I say? Time flies when your making cheese. When I left ya’ll last time, I was heading off to Atlanta to dish up some cheese at the 16th annual High Museum Wine Auction. We were fortunate enough to pair our dishes (Gougeres, Roasted Beets with Fresh Chevre, and Toast and Fig Preserves with Green Hill) with wine from Garretson Wine Company in Paso Robles, CA. The wine maker, Mat Garretson, is a super nice guy and was very generous with his pours at the wine auction, so if you are looking for wine to pair with our cheeses- check out http://www.garretsonwines.com. Here’s a picture of our table…
It’s difficult returning to the dairy after hanging out at wine auctions and all, there’s always so much catching up to do and it’s hard returning to those early mornings! But there are always things to look forward to, like a blue showing the first signs of P. Roqueforti…
or young, eager, cheese makers-to-be…
or impromptu cheese tastings with the SGD crew…
and then of course there was our Spring Market Day on April 26th, which required weeks of preparation and of which there are no pictures because everyone is so busy running around trying to fill the demands for thousands of pounds of cheese!
So, you see, I’ve been busy, but I did not forget about TITAN- my washed-rind cheese. It turned out great, nice salt, buttery texture and putrid odour that could clear a room!
I’ve made another batch since the first post and I’ve tweaked the texture a bit so that the cheese oozes when you cut into it. Anyway, we shipped the first one off to Applewood Restaurant in Brooklyn, New York. For more info, check http://www.applewoodny.com/
Well, first and foremost, I nailed down the recipe for the washed-rind cheese and they took their first dip in a beer bath the other day… ”
The choice to make a washed-rind cheese was an easy one. Having spent many a years living in Wisconsin, it was a state requirement that I love both cheese and beer! It was only natural that my love of these two things would lead me to unite them in casein bliss! I may be jumping ahead of the game here. Why, might you ask, am I washing cheese in beer? The primary culture of washed-rind cheeses is Brevibacterium linens or simply B. linens. It is an orange growth on the outside of cheeses such as Munster, Epoisses, and Livarot and it stinks! As far as cheese cultures go, B. linens is a prima donna and while the star of the washed-rind show, needs a supporting cast to really bring the house down (or make it stink). She needs a neutral PH to thrive and yeasts, which breakdown proteins and subsequently decrease acidity help her to shine. Yeasts are what Pavarotti was to Renata Scotto (a quintessential prima donna) in il Lombardi. Lombardy is ironically the home to Taleggio cheese. OK, if I haven’t lost you yet with the opera/cheese analogies, I’ll get back on track. Yeasts are not something we generally try to encourage in the cheese room, so the yeast needed for our stinky cheese must come from somewhere else. Beer, which the cheesemaker has an abundance of (at least this one does) is the natural choice. I chose Ayinger’s Celebrator because it is a bock beer. Bock in German, roughly translates to billy goat and I thought I’d really drive home the point that this is a goat cheese. Bock beer’s are typically dark with lots of sweet malt, chocolate and dark bread. How these beers became named after billy goats is a mystery to me, but I plan to name this cheese TITAN after our beloved billy goat whose own stench gives washed-rind cheeses a run for their money ” alt=”" />
I know it’s been a while. Let’s just say that the New Year brought a wrath of mechanical failures with it. Maybe some of you know that our pasteurizer was down for a while and while not having to make Green Hill for a week or so was a nice change of pace, it made me very nervous and anxious. I’ll be honest for a moment and tell you that I loathe pasteurized cheese. For cheese heads, it’s all about raw milk. I am no exception but seeing as how this blog could easily expand into a tirade on the government’s zealous regulation on the dairy industry, I will save this for another time. I will say that I do depend on Green Hill to make a living and people’s willingness to consume semi-ripened double cream cheeses in unheard numbers allows me to experiment with cheeses I hold in higher regard. For example- the often overlooked washed rind cheese. I’m not sure how you could overlook it, you can smell it from a mile away. Known somewhat affectionately in France as “les pieds de dieu” or “feet of God,” washed rind cheeses such as Epoisses, Taleggio, and Limburger are more bark than bite in reality. I once saw a sign in a Monroe, Wisconsin bar during their bi-annual Cheese Days Festival that surmised: “Limburger- for your mouth, not your nose.” Very true. I finally got my opportunity to experiment with this style the other day and I have included a little photo gallery of the process.
I will lament that it appears that my experiment has blown up though.
Good news though is that the size and shape of the holes indicate they are gas holes and not coliform holes (bacteriophage) which means I need to tweak the culture a little. I will reattempt this on Thursday, so stay tuned…
Happy new year cheeseheads! Now that the holidays are over and I’ve had some time to reflect and contemplate, I’m psyched for 2008! Last year, I made my resolution to get an apprenticeship making cheese by the years end. Having fulfilled my 2007 resolution, I’m looking to focus on quality and productivity as my resolution for 2008. To me, these two things are dependent on each other and require striking a delicate balance. Yet, there is an evil force lurking in my cheese room that stands to destroy my resolution. Bacteriophage is just like that donut, or in our case, piece of cheese, that could break our resolve. Bacteriophage are viruses that infect bacteria and if your wondering how this has anything to do with your diet, let me explain it this way. Cheese makers use bacteria (the good kind) to culture milk and thus make cheese. The good bacteria (culture) are introduced to the milk, feed off lactose, convert it to lactic acid, lowering the PH and subsequently, creating an inhospitable atmosphere for bad bacteria. Turning lactose into lactic acid requires the utilization of metabolism, which is precisely the process that bacteriophage attacks. In effect, bacteriophage renders culture unable to do it’s job. Unfortunately, I often can’t see bacteriophage at work until it’s too late. It’s like that one donut every week that seems harmless until I try to put on my bathing suit for the summer. Seriously folks, bacteriophage will attack my acidifying starter culture and cause my Goudas to blow up like beach balls. This is not pretty. How to cope? I have to anticipate what the bacteriophage’s plan of attack is and counter-attack by rotating different strains of acidifying culture. So, to keep my resolution of quality and productivity alive, I have to stay one-step ahead of the “phage” by essentially engaging in biological warfare. More from the front lines soon…
Well folks, I had hoped to dive a little deeper into the subculture of culture and draw up a more cohesive image of what’s going on in that cheese you are eating. Alas, the holidays are upon us and that means a quiet storm is brewing at Sweet Grass. For the most part, my work is done. Raw milk cheeses need two months of aging to be legal for sale, so the big wheels were cranked out some time ago. However, our most popular cheese is Green Hill, which is made from pasteurized milk and needs only a few weeks to ripen. As fast as I can make ‘em, Jeremy and the gang in the packing room are wrapping and boxing them ten times faster. Let me give you an idea of what I’m talking about. In the regular season, we make Green Hill roughly twice a week and if the milk is luscious and fatty, we can get 440+ cheeses in a day. During the holidays, we are making Green Hill four times a week! And remember that this time of the year is a transitional one for the cows- they are calving- so the milk quality varies. We have started getting milk from Grassy Flats- the newest member to our family of farms- and I can tell the differences and nuances between it and Green Hill’s. Needless to say, our yields are not what we’d always wish, especially now when it’s more crucial than ever. I’m lucky if I get 400 cheeses a day. I know 400 seems like a lot but I just back from the airport where I dropped off a thousand or so destined for the west coast. While we are on the topic, remember that when you are eating artisanal cheeses- you are subject to the whimsy of the seasons. The goats and cows graze upon different grasses, flowers, and herbs throughout the year and the milk reflects the variety and changes in their diet. In addition to diet, stress, health and weather are factors. All of this affects the raw product I work with in the cheese room- recipes change because variables in production change. So, when the milk isn’t as fatty or chock full of protein, as it is now, I have to be extra careful because the curd isn’t as resilient as it is in the spring. As I commented earlier today to Jeremy, it’s the same thing everyday but different everyday. So the moral of this story is to make it your New Years resolution to taste Green Hill or any other cheeses at different times of the year and savor the subtleties of the seasons, particularly the extra care put into your winter cheeses!
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Well folks, I had hoped to dive a little deeper into the subculture of culture and draw up a more cohesive image of what’s going on in that cheese you are eating. Alas, the holidays are upon us and that means a quiet storm is brewing at Sweet Grass. For the most part, my work is done. Raw milk cheeses need two months of aging to be legal for sale, so the big wheels were cranked out some time ago. However, our most popular cheese is Green Hill, which is made from pasteurized milk and needs only a few weeks to ripen. As fast as I can make ‘em, Jeremy and the gang in the packing room are wrapping and boxing them ten times faster. Let me give you an idea of what I’m talking about. In the regular season, we make Green Hill roughly twice a week and if the milk is luscious and fatty, we can get 440+ cheeses in a day. During the holidays, we are making Green Hill four times a week! And remember that this time of the year is a transitional one for the cows- they are calving- so the milk quality varies. We have started getting milk from Grassy Flats- the newest member to our family of farms- and I can tell the differences and nuances between it and Green Hill’s. Needless to say, our yields are not what we’d always wish, especially now when it’s more crucial than ever. I’m lucky if I get 400 cheeses a day. I know 400 seems like a lot but I just back from the airport where I dropped off a thousand or so destined for the west coast. While we are on the topic, remember that when you are eating artisanal cheeses- you are subject to the whimsy of the seasons. The goats and cows graze upon different grasses, flowers, and herbs throughout the year and the milk reflects the variety and changes in their diet. In addition to diet, stress, health and weather are factors. All of this affects the raw product I work with in the cheese room- recipes change because variables in production change. So, when the milk isn’t as fatty or chock full of protein, as it is now, I have to be extra careful because the curd isn’t as resilient as it is in the spring. As I commented earlier today to Jeremy, it’s the same thing everyday but different everyday. So the moral of this story is to make it your New Years resolution to taste Green Hill or any other cheeses at different times of the year and savor the subtleties of the seasons, particularly the extra care put into your winter cheeses!