Cheddar empire: Rise of a cheese superpower
cnn.com
cnn.com
The typical cheddars you can get in a supermarket are fine. But more expensive variants are at pretty much a different level.
yancys in new york makes a very serviceable sharp cheddar, while Tillamook consistently turns out very good smoked cheddars. their 2010 masters reserve is heavenly.
That's a strong statement. I've yet to come to anything even remotely close to the taste of aged (2-3 years minimum, when grains form inside) hard cheeses like Comte, Gruyere, Beaufort and probably dozen or two more, mostly french. Copies I've had, sometimes even more expensive than original, can't seriously compare (ie french versions of Gruyere vs original AOC variant, and one would expect that French would get this right).
If you actually done that comparison in person, then I believe you, otherwise, buy a plane ticket after covid. What folks here can create from raw cow/goat/sheep/buffalo milk and some bacteria (and/or worms) is ridiculously good, an universe of tastes on its own.
And I haven't even started into properly artisanal, often local-only cheeses. They are not exported even within their own country, forget to see it anywhere across the pond.
https://wccc.myentries.org/contest/results?event=63&submit=S...
There actually are some good US cheeses, although oddly enough not a single one of them comes from Wisconsin to the best of my knowledge. (Vermont, Iowa, and California in case you were wondering.)
Almost anything that goes through the the Jasper Hill Cellars in Vermont is going to give you incredible cheese (they don't make them all, but they do act as an aging facility).
Hard cheese is more of long shot in the US, although amazingly the WI-based Bellavitano brand is trying hard (admittedly a lot of the time by adding flavorings, but still ...). Landaff is another hard cheese somewhat similar to some of the tangier UK hard cheeses, but quite unique.
Cheddars in the US are nothing like UK cheddar (as the article noted). New England cheddars probably have the most complex flavor profile, as long as you stay on the "sharp" end of the scale. They are as strong as a good west country cheddar, but just different.
For soft cheeses though, OMG, an embarrassment of riches. Winnimere - unctuous, stinky, incredible. Humboldt Fog - goat, with ash layer, delicious, midway between the really strong French ripened goats and mere chevre. Oma and Moses Sleeper (both ripened at Jasper Hill) are also deep and complex.
There are a couple of blues too: Russian River (out of central CA) and Bayley Hazen are particularly interesting, though also quite unlike any of the great european blue cheeses (nobody seems to be trying this, sadly).
And these are all nationally distributed varieties. If you live in the right parts of the US, there are typically local varieties (at least of soft types, less so for hard cheeses) that will be worth trying.
None of this is to say that US cheese is "better". It's just amazing how far it has come in the last 20 years, and how good the best of it is compared to european options.
Gruyere remains unmatched anywhere. But that doesn't excuse the northern european tier (Nederlands, Germany in particular) from producing "cheese" generally better suited to filling holes in walls than eating! :)
American cheeses are different, though, sometimes because of pasteurization laws. If one wants a great Brie then don't get an American cheese. But if someone wants a great bloomy-rind cheese that can rival the best European cheeses try Jasper Hill's Harbison (or any of the others mentioned above).
It's hilariously out of the way, but it seems that the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont is cranking out some seriously good food and spirits. Caledonia Spirits makes two extremely solid gins, and the aperitif ciders from Eden Ciders have to be tasted to be believed.
Willey's Store in Greensboro will have most of Jasper Hill cheeses for sale and maybe an experimental cheese or two. The HQ for Ben & Jerry's ice cream is in Waterbury and the tour is fun (with a free sample at the end).
Depending on when you go there will likely be farmer's markets all through the area with local producers selling all sorts of great stuff.
I'll have to check those out, thanks for the recommendations! Especially the gin and cider sounds great!
I haven't yet been to or tried Farnum Hill Ciders in the Lebanon, NH area, but I've heard it's worth a visit. They've been in business at least 20 years, so they must be doing something right.
Hogwash Farm has pretty solid sausage (and other meats) and sells from a farm stand. I'm sure there are many other excellent similar farms. That's just one I've tried.
Woodbelly Pizza is a mobile operation based in Montpelier does wood fired pizza that's highly worth catching. The oven is on a trailer. They might be at the Montpelier farmers' market.
Cabot used to do tour of their creamery but apparently discontinued that in 2018. They still offer samples, according to their website. Their location in Quechee also offers samples.
If you come during sugaring season, you can't throw a stone without hitting a sugar house. I haven't yet had bad maple syrup.
Less Vermont-specific, the Inn at the Long Trail is home to an Irish pub with a pretty broad selection of Irish whiskey.
And getting pretty far afield, the Euro Delli du Village in Mansonville, Quebec had some pretty damn good sandwiches when we were portaging through in 2016 or 2017. If you've made it as far as Newport VT, it's only a half hour drive (plus a border crossing, obviously).
The Harbison is similarly divine. It's unusual in that it's a soft cheese wrapped in the cambium of spruce trees. If this sounds weird, it is, but the result is incredible.
Also, I've found myself (for the duration of the coronavirus) not too far from Vermont. Is there anywhere else you'd recommend visiting in the area aside from Jasper Hill Cellars? Thanks for the recommendation of Jasper Hill, I'll have to visit :)
Too much rubber :) There are some good dutch (and german) cheeses, it is true. But I find that too many of them share a texture that I have a hard time appreciating. Fine, I guess for fondue or other melting applications, but the idea of eating it as doesn't do much for me.
Another side note: I was in southern Spain in the winter of 2016/2017 and was amazed that almost none of the cheese that I could buy there seemed to be exported, and likewise, almost all of the Spanish cheese I've seen in the US and the UK was quite hard to find in Spain (regular stores, not cheese stores).
The problem in both regions, if you want to call it a problem, is that much of the variety is in local cheeses you'll never or rarely see going outside of a zip code, state, or country (in the case of Europe). So someone will move to, say, Virginia in the US and conclude that they've sampled US cheese, not being aware of all the local cheeses in another state that never travel outside of the area of a few counties. The same thing can happen in the UK and Europe. The cheeses I've loved most have been from these local dairies, cheeses that don't quite fit into traditional categories, and that I can never find unless I'm physically in the area.
They do get it right, it's just called Comté ;) (really - the Comté area is not very far away from Gruyères)
Personally I prefer Comté for eating and Gruyère for cooking.
Nope, I'll just buy from the EU, thanks.
On the other hand this is why I only buy California olive oil. You never know what's in European olive oil.
California Olive Oil is fresher, the Italian imported stuff can sit in an unrefrigerated tanker for an extended period of time before being shipped across the ocean to the US.
Cooks Illustrated did a chemical analysis of olive oils a few years back, and US sourced olive oil was by far the freshest and least likely to be rancid. Some of the "authentic" Italian olive oil wasn't even 100% olive oil.
From what I can tell, California Olive Ranch's products took off right after that, since they were #1 rated. Heck when the alternative is "most likely rancid", well, I certainly switched to them as well!
It looks like they are back to selling 100% California sourced olive oil, but the "Destination" series remains. At least it is all clearly labeled, but that doesn't mean much without ongoing third party testing as to the contents.
Whilst I personally wish some kind of domain d'origine had applied, it is worth pointing out that stilton cannot actually be made in the village of stilton due to DOC rules: it's outside the area. Wensleydale is basically dead now, in the same sense. (I mention it because Wensleydale and red Leicester are both cheddared. I am unsure if traditional stilton is, but it has 'crumb' so it's very likely)
The boat has sailed. Cheddar is like aspirin or thermos, it's a generic. The American national cheese reserve probably is cheddared? Is pretty unlike Cheddar as I know it. If it helps preserve a milk surplus, feeds people on food stamps and helps farms, it has a role.
Cheddar gorge is lovely. They did paper making there due to water power.
When I lived in York in the 1980s there was a cheese shop just outside the city walls on the south side near the fulford road which sold hand made/artisanal wensleydale, red and stilton, and blued varieties of the wenslydale and the red. they were fantastically good.
The other thing you can't get for love nor money out here in OZ is a russet apple: you can't been wensleydale and a good crisp russet apple.
I went on a couple of school trips to Cheddar Gorge. It's a beautiful place. The highlight for me was Wookey Hole and the stories of the witch.
I thought cheddar took off because it's easy to transport and store).[/success kid]
PS: Cheddar is definitely nicer than creme fraiche (unless you enjoy soggy sandwiches, and a salad... no, just no). ;)
That said, there are caves that you can explore with speleologists.
Also, Cheddar gorge itself is really short. The geography is interesting though. Water from mendips result in a perpetual spring in the middle of Wells. (hence the name)
And the spring in Glastonbury Tor. Probably.
PS. Area is great for good cheap cider aka scrumpy.
Source: I grew up in Dorset and was a teenager.
I’m not really sure why things happened this way. Maybe it was cheaper or an effect of rationing. Unlike the US, I don’t think the U.K. ever banned making cheese with raw milk so perhaps it was a trend in consumer habits rather than one encouraged by the government or industry.
I'm a big cheddar fan and I had never heard of this:
> Aged cheddar, like other hard, aged cheeses, is very low in lactose.
Also, the snippet about cheddar growing in popularity due to its ease of transport (spoils slower due to less moisture content) is interesting.
PDO and A(d')OC are such a scam. Cheddar refers to a style of cheese, Champagne refers to a style of wine. Bah humbug.
Is this similar to how “pudding” is used for “dessert”, or is it simply that almost all the cheese will be cheddar anyway?
I don't want to imply neither that this is still the case (it was 20 years ago), nor that it happened everywhere (I obviously didn't visit or live in every region of britain at the time, I lived in Glasgow and visited various other parts).
What I'm 100% sure of is that it wasn't the sign for the specific cheddars part of the cheese section in in the store. I made a double take on numerous occasions because the biggest "main" navigation store signs were saying "Bread",...,"Jams", "Cheddars" etc which was the surprising bit for me as a foreigner looking for non-cheddar cheese.
In the cheddars section there were of course all sorts of cheese! Once I started noticing it I started looking for the phenomenon in stores, and it wasn't just one store. Sadly I can't remember if it was just one chain of stores (it's likely).
The anglos across the channel have literally hundreds of different types of regional cheese. Cheddar is not synonymous with cheese here.
When you eat toothpaste, does more fluoride make it taste better?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=toothpaste
Anyway, who could possibly outdo:
Show HN: I invented a caffeinated toothpaste( https://www.powertoothpaste.com/ )
And that's all they say about that. Nothing about animal rights, animal welfare, or government dairy subsidies. Legend has it that at one point the US government was paying 75% of the price of dairy.
I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if you took that out here, vegan soymilk and dairy milk would cost the same. That bugs me. It's a free market except for isolationism, cronyism, and the need for "small farmers" to act as PR fronts. Occasionally there is a good regulation that does something useful.
Im a New Zealander and it used to be a thing I’d read about and feel frustrated. However dairy farming trashes your land and waterways. Selling milk and milk powder is about the dumbest use of the land we could have come up with and it had caused massive harm.
This is because Europeans believe our agricultural peculiarities are worth protecting from the disruption of unbridled economic influences. Countries like France, Spain, or Italy, protect their milk so they can protect their cheese, so they can protect their recipes, so they can protect their food culture (and revenues) at large - a differentiator in the long term.
Some of the EU's subsidies go to "agricultural peculiarities" or small producers of niche traditional foods. That's fine, you're still propping up demand for the raw materials - that milk is just as good as any other if it comes to a crisis.
So this is either a necessary evil to correct a weird market or insane gov’t subsidy depending on your perspective.
When laws changed and made the market national, huge producers were able to takeover the market and are in the process of putting everyone out of business. Yogurt in Trader Joe’s is shipped in from LA.
Consumer prices haven’t dropped. As big producers vertically integrate, prices are going up for many commodities.
And Eugene, Oregon. TJ's French Village plain nonfat yogurt is Nancy's Yogurt from Springfield Creamery in Eugene (formerly in Springfield), run by the Kesey family.
I personally can't stand the stuff. The main selling point seems to be "it melts like cheese" but in my experience, it takes on a snotty texture. It'd probably help if I was a real vegan and didn't have alternatives...
So it's taste-and-texture replication. I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese, as much as to be something that can be reasonably substituted for dairy cheese in the typical cases where it is used. It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc.
It isn't, indeed. I've tried a whole bunch of different vegan cheeses, and while they sometimes call them "mozzarella", "camembert" or other dairy cheese names, they do not try to match the taste. It would be an obviously losing battle as the best they could do is to be as good, most probably and understandably falling short of that. They instead create new kinds of cheese-like products, sometimes taking inspiration from dary cheeses sometimes not, and the results are actually pretty good espectially considered how recent the art of vegan cheese is!
Unrelated, but why is it American's treat soy milk this way? American brands of soy milk are terrible, while Asian brands of soy milk can taste really good.
Then there's the Real Vegan Cheese project in the East Bay, which isn't venture funded and therefor seems to be moving a bit more slowly: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/real-vegan-cheese#/