A Dairytale Honeymoon

On the first day of a honeymoon on a tropical island, most people do romantic crap like gaze into each others' eyes and hold hands on the beach. I asked my newlywed spouse to drive a rental car through treacherous Puerto Rican election-week traffic to a small town an hour outside of San Juan to visit the island's only artisanal cheesemaking facility. It's cool. He knew what he was getting into with me.

When vetting honeymoon locations, one of the first things I did was look for a local cheesemaker to visit in the area (there are cheesemakers in both Kenya and South Africa, for those interested). I defend this as a completely justifiable occasion for a cheese adventure. After all, as I've noted before, cheese is a known aphrodisiac.

I discovered Quesos Vaca Negra while perusing through Culture Magazine many months ago while we were still in honeymoon discussions. So, when we decided on a Caribbean destination with a two-day layover in Puerto Rico, the first thing I did before booking anything was contact the ladies in charge of the cheese operation at QVN and beg them to let me visit.  Rosa and Wanda graciously obliged. 

We dragged ourselves out of our comfortable hotel room early that first morning, hopped in our rental car and navigated ourselves through a rural area just outside of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. In a converted house, we found an immaculate cheesemaking room, aging facility, milk-quality testing lab, and Rosa, our kind host for the morning.

Since their start as full-time cheesemakers about four years ago, the ladies of Quesos Vaca Negra have become local celebrities and the only destination for quality aged raw milk cheeses in Puerto Rico. The operation started off as a milk testing lab that helped local dairy farmers determine their milk quality. Soon, Rosa and Wanda began dabbling in some home cheesemaking with the milk that their farmer-clients supplied in trade for lab tests. These two bold, confident, intelligent ladies decided to turn it into something more; something that the Puerto Rican market lacked, yet craved. Four years later they are getting big-time attention from the North American cheese market, and at least one over-eager cheese girl from Texas pounding on their doors to make a new cheese friend.

They have about a half dozen cheeses in their repertoire, ranging from Gruyere-style to Cheddar, and the occasional experiment with adding spices, herbs, and flavors to some of their standards. Their cheeses appear on the Puerto Rican market in local grocery stores as well as through their farmers market presence in Old San Juan.

Student cheese in the brine
from a recent class

They also hold cheesemaking classes for local cheese-o-philes. In most cheesemaking classes that I've seen, you pay a solid Benjamin to get a twenty minute lecture on cultures, rennet, and dairy science, stretch some mozzarella, stir some vinegar into warm milk (Bam! Ricotta.), and peace out with your standard homemade concoctions. These ladies, on the other hand, do it right. At the end of their class, each participant has a full wheel of raw milk cheese that will be aged for them at the QVN facility for two months. The students can bring their own spices to set their cheese apart from their classmates' creations. After the cheese has aged, they come back and pick up their handmade dairy delight. It's a lot more post-event effort on the teachers' end, but that's a cheesemaking class worth dropping some cheddar on.

All of QVN'a milk comes from various local dairy farmers on the island. Each cheese is named after the local region from which its milk originates. The milk travels from the farms to the QVN facility in a giant dairy tank that they welded to the back of a standard size pick up truck. One glance at their makeshift dairy muscle truck solidified Rosa and Wanda's position in my cannon of dairy heroes.

In Old San Juan, Rosa owns another slice of heaven -- a bright pink waterfront townhome in the colorful architectural style of the neighborhood. She hopes to turn it into a cheese and charcuterie shop. It would be the first of its kind in that area for locals and tourists alike. If it were open for our visit, it would have been the ideal spot to get some honeymoon picnic provisions. Every town needs the perfect cheese shop.

During our two-hour visit, we toured their facility, talked cheese, ate cheese. And like the cheese pros who helped them get on their feet, Rosa, now a certifiable pro herself, gave me advice and the offer of future troubleshooting help in getting started with my own cheesemaking operation.

I had the singular experience of making a cheese friend on vacation. On my honeymoon, no less. And with all the goodwill Tad had earned for taking me out there and stuffing his face with cheese, there was still plenty of time left over for all the romantic crap too.

With this Cheese, I Thee Wed

After a self-imposed hiatus from Cheesy Street to take care of a little business, namely getting married, I'm back. This serves as a brief but much needed reminder -- mostly for myself -- that the cheese dream is alive and well.

This isn't a wedding blog so I'll keep the recap brief: the wedding weekend was more fun than I could have hoped; it was an unforgettable way to begin a life with my biggest fan who has encouraged me through pounds of cheese dreams; and it made me wish I could round up all the beautiful people we have been given in our lives and force them to live closer to me. Oh and we had a cheese sculpture.

Actually we served a lot of cheese. Thanks to the three farms where I started off making cheese, I was able to curate a legit cheese plate. None of my cheese heroes were able to make it to the big day, but they were more than represented in spirit with the cheeses they sent me. It warmed my guests' bellies and it warmed my heart to know that I'd worked with such amazing, supportive people. There was a soft, bloomy offering with the raw milk brie and fig leaf-wrapped Eden from Brazos Valley Cheese. We had the firm, nutty sheep's milk Queso de Oveja from Black Sheep Creamery. And for the adventurous guests there was the soft, pungent Hooligan from Cato Corner. Along with the cheeses I threw out some staple accompaniments like mustard, fig jam, dried pears, and candied nuts.

There was also the safe option of mild Wisconsin cheddar cubes, which was no less awe-inspiring because it came from a cheese sculpture representing our KS+TX theme by depicting Tad's alma mater with a Texas Longhorn mascot marrying my beloved KU Jayhawk mascot (in a more feminine rendition). It was, in a word, badass. The sculpture was carved and shipped by the sweet and talented, Sarah Kaufmann, who is currently a Guinness World Record holder as sculptor of the largest cheese carving ever. Plus, we're basically best friends forever now. She doesn't know it yet.

My homies at Bedford Cheese Shop were also represented with the cheese wall I made with cheese label art I collected while I was there. It might attract its fair share of flies, but this thing is getting hung up on proud display when we get a new house.

There was almost no cheese leftover at the end of the night. Guests of varying cheese experience and comfort levels devoured it all. Seeing how much everyone enjoyed and talked about the cheese drove home the point that you can really get crazy with the cheeses you cater to big events. It doesn't have to be boring to please everyone. If it's a diverse group of people, a diverse array of cheeses will have something for everyone.

Now, I'm back in the heart of West Texas, trying to set up my own cheese world. First my plan involves contacting goat cheese makers and goat breeders in the area, which I've already started doing (updates on that shortly). Then...we'll see. For now, it's good to be back!

From One Empire to My Own: So Begins A Cheese Career

A little over three weeks ago I had an apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. A little over four weeks ago, I had a job in an amazing, well-respected cheese shop in NYC, learning from supremely knowledgeable cheesemongers. Today, I've put almost 2,000 miles on the road as I sit in a small border town looking for a house in city limits that will let me keep a would-be pet goat in the backyard.

Soon, you will be mine. 

Drastic changes are no stranger to me, but this time it's a little scarier. I'm back in Del Rio, starting the long arduous process of constructing a career for myself where one doesn't exist. As much as I loved making cheese in Waco the last time I was here, the 10-hour commute is off the table now. Have you seen the price of gas?! Have you seen the miles I've put on my 14-year-old Honda in the last two years?!

I'm excited that we're here on a protracted-temporary basis for a very good reason (the soon-to-be husband landed his dream job here for the next 3 years, give or take a few months). But it also means I officially begin choosing paths that carry real consequence. Grown-up financial investments and long-term plans no longer take a back seat to temporary gigs that allow me to educate myself about the industry and the product. I've made cheese for a year and mongered cheese for a year. I will always be learning, but my training is officially over. I'm on my own now.

I discovered a lot in New York that will help guide me as I move forward in earnest. One, the cheese business is not pure. The first job I had in New York, which shall remain nameless (but is easily discovered by perusing earlier posts), was awful. It was the law firm of cheese. Nay, it was worse. I respect law firms for what they are -- a necessary cog in the corporate marketplace, where I just didn't happen to fit in. At least they own up to what they are and compensate you accordingly. An evil, mismanaged cheese shop is like a PT Cruiser -- a mutant monstrosity with no business existing and ruining a perfectly fine and joy-inducing industry.

From the cheese empire that almost ruined my time in the Empire State, I learned how NOT to run a shop. I'm thankful for that. And despite dreading every work-day within the first two months there, I did learn how to be a good manager and met some life-long friends in my co-workers. I'm also thankful that it led me to New York, which I loved in its own right, and where I moved on to a magical place in Brooklyn known as the Bedford Cheese Shop. It was there I learned to really be a cheesemonger. I was introduced to hundreds of imported and domestic cheeses and learned to navigate through them all in order to satisfy customers' often passive and indecisive desires. I met some amazing cheesemongers, who taught me so much about good cheese, good food, and good times. Plus, I got pretty confident at cutting pieces off giant wheels with just a knife and brute force.

I really miss Bedford and my co-workers from both shops. I've lived in alot of places, but I've never been immediately homesick for anywhere other than my actual home in Kansas...until now. Even the good mongering experiences taught me something unexpected about my end-goal of owning a cheese business:  Unless it's really small, I don't think I want to run a true cheese shop. In the end, owning and running a storefront leaves little time to actually work with customers and the cheese. Most of your time is spent sitting in a back room on the computer or phone, which is exactly the reason I ran away from the professional world.

I would miss working with my hands and on my feet. Even behind the counter, I kind of missed getting my hands in the vat and working on the farm. Plus, as much as meeting a great customers is rewarding, the horrible ones can cancel out the day. Retail, much like law, will drive you to the bottle.

The last year re-calibrated my desires back to pursuits like cheese production and cheese education, where I can sell in small doses at farmers markets, work directly with the product, and meet interested consumers. Del Rio still has the opportunity to be a fun adventure and a blank slate of opportunities, as it was during my last stint here. This time I just I have to construct that opportunity on my own and stick with it. So begins the adventure: getting married, getting a house, getting a goat, and getting the balls to start on a career path that will cause me to loose money for years before I can make any.

Cheesemonger Hunger Games

Last month, I witnessed the WWE smackdown of the cheesemonger world. You had staged attire...adrenaline-fueled battling...rowdy yelling...drunks. Substitute a rink with a cold-storage warehouse in Queens, elbow drops with wrapping contests, and hot dogs with a Raclette machine. Cheese elite from everywhere gathered to let loose for a little "friendly" competition. Behold the 3rd Annual Cheesemonger Invitational. 

For the last three years, cheesefolk have gathered in New York every summer for what some of us call the cheesemonger Hunger Games. Nobody dies, but everyone takes it VERY seriously...and knives are involved. Each cheesemonger showcases their skills in various levels of competition: blind taste-test cheese identification, written exam, quarter-pound cutting skills, wrapping skills, marketing/selling skills, and cheese plate pairings. 

The crowd of cheesemongers, makers and enthusiasts get to really nerd out, wildly cheering for a cheesemonger's consecutive perfect quarter-pound cuts as if a hologram of Tupac just appeared onstage. Except at the end of the day nobody understands how cool that was except for us. It's the little things in cheese. 

The eventual victor hailed from Cowgirl Creamery in my old hood of Washington, D.C. The multi-hour competition concluded, and a dairy-fueled dance party ensued. 

It was an opportunity to hang out with old cheese friends (the awesome Cato Corner crew and Bedford Cheese Shop homies) and make new cheese friends (who will probably never remember my name after their last trip to the open bar). As the excitement for cheese grows in this country, so do the creative, celebratory events that allow us to come together and really enjoy each other and what we do. Next year, though, I'd like to see more headbutts and clotheslining. 

Today's Forecast: Cheese Degrees Fahrenheit

During the hottest summer days, retailers generally see a significant decline in customer traffic and cheese consumption. At the shop, even the weekends became a manageable trickle of customers when warmer weather arrived. Same goes for farmers markets. Though warmer spring weather brings more products, vendors and traffic, the crowd begins to thin again as the summer mercury inches beyond the temperature sweet spot.

Once a threshold is breached, people just don't seem to want to rub their swollen paws and sweaty face all up in a slimy piece of cheese. To make matters worse, everything smells more ripe in the summer -- public restrooms, garbage cans, sidewalk pee. Odorous cheese nubs wreaking of wet earth or dirty sock don't strike a chord when hunger strikes.

Temperature, however, will never beat up on my allegiance to dairy. Until the day that I die, I'll eat ice cream when it's 10-degrees outside and cheese when it's 100. Yet, even I have to modify slightly when it gets too hot. If you listen to your biological need for cheese...and to me...you'll find there is a way for all cheese lovers and friends to enjoy cheese on a hot day.

In the warmer months, I tend to gravitate towards light cheeses. Fresh cheeses like chevre or burrata are a popular option for the summer. But cheeses with a little age on them can be refreshing as well. St. Maure, for instance, can have a little flavorful bloomy-mold-funk that is partnered with a mild citric tartness reminiscent of summer flavors. Even though the heat can easily turn soft cheese into a puddle, either young bloomy cheeses or un-aged fresh cheeses with higher moisture levels will leave less of an astringent saltiness on the palate. Because who wants the sensation of licking a salty armpit when it feels like you put your face into one as soon as you walk out the door? 

One of my favorite refreshing cheese treats for the summer is mixing fresh berries with fresh cheese. A bowl-full of whole-milk ricotta with honey and berries is a standard favorite. But I can do you one better with Barilotto + berries and honey. Barilotto is a young, pressed, buffalo milk ricotta made from the re-heating of the whey remaining after a buffalo mozzarella make. It's brought to us dairy nerds of America by Casa Madaio in Italy, who give us some of the best Italian cheeses you will find stateside. You should seek out their cheese whenever possible. 

Barilotto is light, smooth, moist, slightly sweet and spongy. It's whey-based so it doesn't bring the same heavy creaminess as whole-milk ricotta; and it's buffalo's milk which is naturally lactose-free and sweeter. When you douse it in raw honey and strawberries, you've basically got a deconstructed (somewhat healthier) cheesecake having a party on your tongue. And, trust me, there ain't no party like a cheesecake party...

Novelists:Cheese::Children:Scissors

Six months ago I made a cheese-related purchase that has haunted me. Finding myself alone in New York at Christmas, I treated myself to a fancy dinner and a new book. The book, part of a trilogy, was so hilariously titled and so amusingly blurbed on Amazon (you read it here first; blurb can become a verb) that I was ready to flaunt its sarcastic, nonsensical, tongue-in-cheek humor like a 2005 hipster wearing a Gettin Lucky in Kentucky t-shirt.

Sitting before the first course of my holiday prix fixe, I proudly opened page one of....ahem...The Long Quiche Goodbye, the first book in The Cheese Shop Mystery series (Lost and Fondue and Clobbered by Camembert being the other two). I was promised a modern-day Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery set in a small-town cheese shop, with the odd bonus of recipes in the back. What I got was an embarrassment that I forced myself to read a few pages at a time on the subway, doing my best to completely shield the front cover from onlookers with my hand and GIANT bookmark. 

I wasn't expecting Dickens but I had high hopes for a bit of sarcastic cheese humor peppering a moderately captivating mystery story. Six months later, I would sooner eat waxed Gouda rinds than read the next two books in the series. 

By the book's third sentence, the main character/first-person narrator was name-dropping a Humboldt Fog-Chardonnay pairing like it was a revelation. What the hell kind of lead is that? Would Agatha Christie use the first page to tell me what biscuits and finger sandwiches she likes best with her tea?! As a sidenote, if you work in cheese, that writer has just lost all credibility by trying to pull you in with that lame as hell nugget of information. But even the average Joe pleasure reader demands a little more literary skill in subtly finessing a quirky theme.  

It's set in a cheese shop. That's cute. The main character is in love with a local cheesemaker. That's believable. Really, that's pretty much all you need. But the book just ....goes....on.... with stilted, awkward (and sometimes obscure) cheese references, pairing suggestions, and flavor descriptions. If cheese must become a bigger player in literature, there must be some way of using the craft or vocation as a silent backdrop character like what authors do with a city or home. With this book, however, I'm bombarded with already awkward flirtations between the love interests interrupted with talk of Tomme Crayeuse paninis.

In the ultimate "heated" confrontation with the killer we get these gems of internal conflict in the protagonist's head: 

"Hurling something was out of the question. I stunk at softball, hence the concussion I suffered in high school.  I would miss my mark. Besides, getting whacked by china teacups probably wouldn't make [killer's name] drop the knife." 

"I didn't say what I was thinking out loud. As Tyanne would say, I hadn't fallen off a turnip truck." 

I wish you hadn't said the last 290 pages of what you were thinking out loud on all of this wasted paper! The only thing dumber than any of this is me for continuing to read. But when I spend money on something, I'm like Homer Simpson with a sandwich. I refuse to waste it, even if it's so bad that it gives me nightmares and makes me throw up and hallucinate. 

By the end, I was at least hoping for one of those surprising (but not really surprising anymore because it happens all the time now) second-ending twists utilized in scary movies.  But why, WHY, would I not just have expected the last sentence to be "...flashing on something Rebecca had said. Perhaps danger was not only becoming her middle name but mine, as well." 

I think I might have used a similar ending in a 5th grade essay about tornadoes. It was a pretty good essay, for a 5th grader.

In Search of Cheese in a Can: An Allegory

Not since the first time I had to tackle cutting from a 60-pound wheel of gouda during a customer rush had I experienced such an out-of-body feeling as I did last week. There was only one other customer in the store. A second walks in the door and immediately makes eye-contact with me. She eagerly begins to ask her question in an unidentifiable European accent before she even reaches the counter. "My friend. My friend, she is from Germany. She wants me to find a cheese for her. I don't know. It is in a can? A tall metal can."

Wait? What? Is this really happening? Is this a joke? You don't look like a punk ass Williamsburg kid trying to mess with me.

After expressing my initial and perhaps awkwardly loud disbelief at the question, she sheepishly responds with, "You go shshwwooosh with it. On a cracker." Shoulder shrug as she ends her query, straight-faced and completely earnest, making the very familiar aerosol sound effect and pantomiming the shshwoooshhh can-squirt gesture.

You're being serious? You are so adorably intrigued and unaware that you came into a high-end big-city cheese shop to ask for Easy Cheese to send back to your German friend? Can I get the security camera footage of this?

I'm not ashamed to say I sent her to the grocery store around the corner and directly to the "aisle with the crackers...usually on the top shelf...you can ask someone; they'll know there."

I didn't laugh her out of the store or make fun of her food quest after she left. Rather, I made fun of myself for my intimate knowledge of the exact aisle where one can find said shshwooosh cheese in a can. There are a lot of retail pet peeves I have after a year behind the counter, some arbitrary some rational. That story, though, just makes me happy.

In fact, my biggest annoyance follows from customers with the exact opposite attitude. The ones who come in, usually from out of town, and put on airs about their love of cheese and how horrible it is where they live. Why can't they just live in a magical place like this with access to the finer things in life, they bemoan dramatically.

Before any of you from Peoria, Albuquerque, Rapid City, Jackson, San Antonio, Pensacola or any other non-descript mini metropolis decide to come into a store and trash talk your city, think about how that reflects upon you and all of your friends back home. That is if you have any friends after the way you just dumped on their motherland.

For one, you've made at least a handful of eavesdropping urbanites more firmly convinced of the hillbilly nature of anything outside of the northern I-95 corridor; and that affects how they treat you no matter how hard you try to act like you're the refined one in your circle. Secondly, that affects how they view your home -- where you come from. Even if you've only lived in Peoria for 5 months, it's your hood now. And that's no way to rep your hood, fool.

Also, you don't look any more cosmopolitan or more like one of the hipster big city kids by talking about how it's impossible to educate yourself about good food where you're from. That's a damn dirty lie, in fact. You just sound like a lazy idiot. You can educate yourself no matter where you are. The first big step is called a book, or the internet. Mail-order either direct from producers or from food-of-the-month clubs can fill your belly and education tank right in your own home. You can cook for yourself and grow your own ingredients. And yes, occasionally travel, is needed to gain knowledge about the food you love. But often even traveling short distances to explore neighboring towns works too. If you go far, be a good sport about it and graciously accept the opportunity as a learning experience that you can take back to your community and neighbors.

And lastly, if it sucks so hard where you're from, who's fault is that? Why don't you do something about it instead of complaining to a cheesemonger 1000 miles away from home? Start a farmers market. Work with artisans, farmers and producers in your community. (Surprise, there probably are some if you took the time to find them.). Raise awareness and build a market for such products. Start a food discussion group. Network with others in nearby small towns. It will likely never be as glutted of a food market as New York, but that doesn't mean it has to stay a wasteland. You can explore new things with friends, neighbors, or on your own if you make the effort.

I respect out-of-town customers who come in with wonderment, curiosity, and excitement for something new that, indeed, is often hard to find outside of this city. They bring a love of their hood with them and take back a love of something new to the place they proudly call home. Even if that something is Easy Cheese.

The Best Part of Spring

Ahhhhhhh dfa;lkdfjasl;kdfjklj!!!

I have a love-hate relationship with Spring. I love breezy patio weather, but I hate cold wet drizzle. I love the return of foliage, but I hate my allergies. I love the smell of the air when the seasons change, but at least for the two years I lived in DC and NYC, I hated the returning stench of public urination in the subway and metro stations. After having worked with cheese and on farms, there's only one thing about Spring I love unconditionally: baby animals.

On small farms, dairy or otherwise, kidding and lambing season is either starting or already in full swing, depending on the particular climate. In addition to birthing the cutest creatures on earth, those new mamas will be producing milk aplenty for their youngsters, the excess of which turns into delicious spring-time cheese. It's true that some breeds of goats and sheep can breed year-round. Additionally, some larger farms engineer ways to trigger a year-round breeding cycle for their animals (opinions differ on the merit of this practice). Some farms may even freeze excess milk to carry them through winter cheese making. The majority of fresh goat cheese, however, is coming into season right now.

To celebrate the season I partook of a gooey, young goat's milk robiola wrapped in fig leaves. Hello Spring! I was instantly drawn to this cheese in the store because 1) The pretty colors of orange twine against the dark green fig leaves caught my eye (I also shop for wine purely by the level of whimsy in the labels); and 2) When I sniffed it, I could taste the figs, which immediately intoxicated the pleasure synapses in my brain. It was a fig-tastic high.

Robiolas are from Northern Italy and can generally be made with varying combinations of goat, cow, or sheep's milk. This one in particular is made purely from goat's milk when it comes into season in the region (February-ish). The rich buttery texture is infused with a sweet fruity and vegetal taste from the leaves. Often when I take a gamble on a cheese I've never at least sampled, I'm mildly disappointed. This cheese, though, exceeded my expectations as soon as it hit the lips. I purchased a bottle of sparkling wine and a mild red wine with a fig on the label (it seemed appropriate, though not as whimsical as I'd like) to pair with the cheese. Both went well, but the crisp, dry sparkling wine was ideal. I also enjoyed taking a bite of cheese and shoving a couple figs in my mouth, chubby-bunny style. Two hours later, my roommate and I had finished all several hundred calories of butterfatty goodness and both bottles of wine. Okay Spring, you're pretty swell.

Cheese in Unexpected Places

It's the end of March. The Final Four is this weekend. I'm a ride or die Jayhawks basketball fan, and I don't have a KU-themed homemade mozzarella pizza to talk about this year. So bear with me as I explain how basketball made me think about cheese during March Madness 2012.

Nobody, not even die-hard KU fans, expected my school, given its roster shortcomings, to make such a deep run in the tournament. Yet, even when things got sloppy, this team maintained composure and proved that big things can happen when you least expect them, as long as you believe in yourself. Final Four bound and making every KU fan more proud than any year I can recall in my two decades of rock chalking.

All this underdog/exceeding expectation talk got me thinking of my trip in February to the most unlikely of homes for cheese. How does a cheese business survive anywhere but big cities and foodie havens like New York? Is it destined to fail at some point, a slave to its market shortcomings? Fade to El Paso, Texas.

Licon Dairy in San Elizario: A surprise detour during a 24-hour trip I assumed would be occupied solely by tacos and steak. I hadn't really thought about the trip to Licon as anything but a fun excursion, until now. With the likelihood of finding myself in a similarly small market becoming more real as I prepare to leave New York, I have Licon to thank for renewing my confidence.

Did I tell you they had a petting zoo?!
Free to the public and school groups.

For 50 years -- fifty freaking years--, this family-run business has been providing high-quality, fresh Asadero (Mexican-style mozzarella or string cheese) to the local community. The offerings at the cheese counter are modest but utilitarian -- Asadero, flavored Asadero, tortilla chips, chicharrones, cream cheese, and whey. There's an oddly placed Payment Agency in the back, so only a fool would expect a day-laborer to buy a wheel of Camembert and fig preserves instead of wiring money to his family. Asadero and whey are often necessary ingredients in local cooking. Tortilla chips and chicharrones? The working class' cheese pairing.

Instead of getting fancy, Licon provides the essentials and does so well. For that reason, this dairy has survived in the most depressed of neighborhoods on the outskirts of a largely middle-class city. The family makes the cheese by hand, doing what they love for the last half century. It is damn good cheese at that (and fantastic sustenance during our ridiculously difficult hike the next day). Simple, but with the intangible quality completely absent from cheeses made without love.

I would never have thought to look for a dairy or cheese counter to visit in El Paso. How could that possibly survive? In El Paso?! I heard the same thing a few years ago. How could you leave a proper day-job after just one year, with so little to invest and so many companies to compete against?  Anything can survive with a little ingenuity, talent, street smarts, self-awareness, confidence, and love. El Paso and basketball taught me this.

Barely Legal: Is it Worth the Risk?

There are a lot of directions in which this post could go...

Raw milk regulations, import taxes and tariffs, politics, the FDA, the USDA, affinage. Obviously these were all buzzword that came to mind when you saw this post, right? ...Riiight?

Well, my sleazy and chaste-minded friends, in case you didn't know, if an unpasteurized cheese has not had at least 60-days to age, it is off limits. Too young. 

The 60-day rule applies to both domestically made and imported cheeses. The given rationale being something something bacteria blah blah danger something something I'm an expert with no practical background in dairy science and/or a lobbyist with competing interests in the dairy industry blah blah yay nay blah blah dumb bill containing dumber regulation passed. (A nutshell of a potential direction this post will not be going.). 

Alas, the rule means many cheeses that the Old World has traditionally made, and made exceptionally well for centuries, as raw milk cheeses are next to impossible to find here in their authentic and historically-delicious form. These are soft, young, raw cheese luminaries that cheesemasters in Europe will age for a few weeks at most until the cheese reaches its full-flavored gooey prime. Brie, for instance, has a short life in the world of affinage. The place I worked in Waco made a rare and delightful raw milk brie. An uncommon treat that they had to carefully control by aging in temperatures that are far below normal for several weeks in order to slow down the aging process, allowing the cheese enough time to reach 60 days and not become a foul rock-hard disc of milk mess. 

So it's not impossible to find a raw milk version of these cheeses here, but it's very difficult and often prohibitively so. It's no joke to get scrutinized by a federal health inspector for making a "taboo" cheese, nor is it a slap on the wrist to get flagged by the FDA for importing a cheese that's too close to the 60-day limit.  (A restaurateur is allowed to make cheese out of his wife's breast milk and that's not taboo but apparently raw milk Reblechon is.). I've heard stories about inspectors giving importers the stink eye just because the label on a soft cheese coming off the ship says raw (au lait cru in French). Over 60 days? Yes. But just barely legal. 

But it does get here sometimes. Is it all worth the risk in making or importing dangerously young versions of raw milk cheeses? 

Cheese connoisseurs will complain about the difficulty in finding a true Camembert, for example, or the tasteless, sub-par pasteurized counterparts Europe is forced to send over (I imagine the continent collectively guffawing over all the superior cheese they get to keep for themselves). Their complaints are justified. To a degree. 

I work in a city that's crazy about cheese; therefore, it's not hard to find the bolder cheese proprietors willing to weazle and claw their way to a young imported cheese. The cheeses I've discovered in the last few months have opened up a new world of deliciously naughty young cheeses.  Pecorino Gregoriano, an extremely young and soft pecorino from the Abruzzo region of Italy, rocked my cheese paradigm. Imagine wrapping all the delicious yeasty, sweet profiles of a bread and carb binge into a compact (and totally carb-free!), fudgy cheese bite. I'd never tasted a cheese profile like that before, and couldn't begin to figure out how you could even get sheep's milk to acquire that taste. It was young, raw and legal...but dangerously so.  

So yeah, when even the average cheese-joe goes to his local grocery store in a lukewarm cheese city to find a bunch of pasteurized Old World knock offs, it does feel a little generic and underwhelming after knowing that the real deal is out there somewhere. It's true that most of those mass produced imports are boring, bland and just lame as hell. So is it worth the risk to go raw and young? Definitely. If you do it right. Keep a clean shop if you're making the stuff (inspectors don't like meth-lab bathtub style raw milk cheese cooks), and source your imports as closely to reputable European farms and producers as possible if you're selling the stuff (you can't complain about "business" trips to Europe to eat cheese). 

But we shouldn't rule out the beauty of pasteurized cheese entirely. Don't let any cheese snob, French, New Yorker, Houstonian, or otherwise, tell you that there is no such thing as a good pasteurized cheese. Because I'm here to tell you there most definitely is! Grocery store brie is disgusting, yes. Pasteurization and production can be done carefully and gently, however, such that you're not totally destroying the flavor profile of the milk and forthcoming cheese. Several of my new favorite cheeses that I've discovered at the shop are in fact pasteurized, as are many domestic cheeses I've enjoyed in the past. Tome Chabrin a tart and sweet goat's milk wheel from France actually tastes like figs, another flavor profile I hadn't experienced. Cheesemakers can control the quality and flavor of pasteurized cheese through effective use of starter cultures.

We all want a little danger in our lives. So if that means I'll have to come back to New York several times a year to find mine in raw, young, spoiled-milk, then so be it. Otherwise, wherever I end up, I'll enjoy the worthwhile pasteurized options available to me via more risk-averse cheese curators. I'm sure I can find something delicious. 

Earning My Cheese Cred

So you know that formula in movies, particularly sports movies, when the weak kid who the audience is really rooting for makes some awesome play to win the respect of the team and fans? "Nice work, kid," his teammates might casually say while giving him a playful head rub. The audience wipes away a single tear.

Well that happened to me in real life on Valentine's Day. Except nobody called me kid, nor did they rub my head. I was the only one crying, on the inside at least. Oh, and I wasn't in a movie or playing a sport. I was selling cheese.

Oh hello, my nemesis.

I am the weakest link in the machine-like cog that is the new cheese shop where I work. I am the new kid amongst knowledgeable cheese mongers who know the most delicate flavor profiles of cheeses from every which region of Europe and can cut through GIANT 40-lb wheels of rock-hard 2-year-old Gouda like it was butter. Until February 14, I had eased into my new job by working mostly weekdays and only one moderately busy, but very well-staffed, weekend day.

The rest of my two week introduction involved slowly getting to know the inventory of cheese and methodically and repeatedly wrapping cheese. I had figured out the characteristics of maybe 1/4 of the almost 200 cheeses. The fine art of wrapping the cheeses was a bit more elusive. The minutes accumulated as I fumbled to find the exact right way to make the plastic wrap practically invisible and glass-like on the surface of every oddly shaped piece. I would often re-wrap the same piece five times until I could get rid of the dreaded air pockets that can cause cheese to deteriorate. This was all good and fine on a slow day. On a busy day, our counter space is valuable. It's a tight squeeze behind the counter and quickly wrapping cheeses to go back in the case is the only way to service a hoard of hungry cheese freaks.

I'll admit my first few days, I felt like an idiot. It became immediately obvious how little I had learned about the vast world of retail cheese in the year-plus I had been working in this field. Sure, maybe I had a leg up on the average new trainee, but I felt like a lowly noob, continually asking my colleagues what cheeses to direct customers towards. Slowly I began to feel a little more comfortable with the case (or could at least guess based on the look of a cheese) and figuring out what the customer needed. I was getting better at wrapping cheeses for the case if I didn't have anyone anxiously waiting for my help. Plus, when nobody was watching I could hack off a workable piece of extra aged gouda from a giant wheel.

So when I showed up for work that Tuesday, I expected another slow easy transition into the expert cheese world. I was SOOO wrong. We were staffed for a regular weekday, and nobody saw the retail slam that was about to hit our doors. From 4pm until we closed at 9pm, nobody had a chance to eat or breathe. There was a lull for three minutes exactly, at which point I shoved a Fiber One bar down my throat. The line never ended. People wanted meats and cheeses and pairing suggestions for their loved ones and the crowded store and frantic cheesemongers were not deterring them. It didn't stop. It's 8:30pm! Shouldn't you be on your date already?!

And there I was, the lone new kid working with three dudes who REALLY know their cheese, their knife skills, and how to wrap and restock quickly to keep our cramped quarters clean. Then it happened. A customer points behind me to the giant bright orange wheel of rock hard gouda. I mentally crossed my fingers as I followed the trajectory of their gaze, hoping they were pointing to something else -- the baguettes maybe? Those are easy. Wrong.

In the middle of a crowded store, standing on a milk crate for leverage, I had to steady a giant knife through a nearly impenetrable wax rind because some fool only wanted a quarter pound of this giant wheel. It's not easy for these weak hands to steady a shaky blade and cut a razor thin slice off this behemoth. But everyone else handles the task with such apparent ease, and I'm going to have figure it out sooner or later.  It was ugly, but I did it without the luxury of assistance or moral support because everyone else was swamped. I wrapped up the giant wheel, restocked, cleaned some knives, and worked through the rest of the customers, person-by-person, keeping pace with my colleagues in trying to get everyone in and out quickly. Eventually, the store cleared out and most of the customers left seemingly happy.

At the end of the night, my co-workers applauded my work. I'm sure when the line started to back up on our understaffed cheese counter they were prepared for a worst case scenario of the new kid bringing the store to a crippling halt through nervousness and ineptitude. Granted, I did have some of that, but at least I managed to avert disaster instead of creating it. That was the day that I finally felt like I'd at least be okay at this.

There are still days that I come home feeling like a loser, brooding about that piece of cheese that fell apart because of one errant knife move or the piece that took me ten minutes to wrap. It will take me a while until I reach their level.  But at least the team can count on me in a moment of crisis.

Grilled Cheese: The Great Neutralizer of Cheese Warfare

Nobody likes a cheese snob. Nobody likes a food snob of any kind really, but a cheese snob might be the most heinous. Unlike, say, wine or a perfectly cooked scallop, cheese is a link to our childhood; the familiar comfort food without class boundaries. To engage in cheese snobbery is an affront to everyone's warm nostalgic cocoon of plebeian culinary memories. It is to say our shared history of sandwich slice American Muenster is garbage because not everyone knows that real Munster cheese is German, soft, virtually unsliceable, and stinky. It is to say your childhood joy for baseball park nachos is inferior to my piece of AOC-protected village-made raw milk Camembert. And that's just mean.

The Cuban Grilled Cheese with plantains

Expanding cheese knowledge and eating right is important, but not at the cost of being a butthead. No cheese food has taught me this lesson more explicitly than the Grilled Cheese. 

I've had my share of grilled cheese experimentation, and the one thing I love about this cheese vehicle is its versatility in conveying each individual's flavor preferences, be they lofty or pedestrian. There are a few universal cross-cultural truths to a good grilled cheese. 

1) The correct skillet or grill heat to achieve a crisp, golden brown (but not burnt) bread and crust

2) Appropriately melted and gooey cheese 

3) Appropriate ingredient ratios to avoid the dreaded sogginess

Beyond that, there are no cheese grilling laws. 

I love that grilled cheese can be a vehicle for almost any culture's street food flavors. Recently, I had a Cuban grilled cheese with Cheddar, Swiss and fried plantains. Similarly, I imagine a Haloumi and eggplant grilled cheese would be delicious if the appropriate limits to ingredient heft are maintained. The list is endless--even for cultures that don't have a cheese tradition. Throw some teriyaki chicken between some melty cheese slices before convincing yourself it's not good without trying it first. 

Sure, there are plenty of delicious ways to snob-up a grilled cheese. Pardon me lad, this poached pear on my grilled brie sandwich is far too crisp. Righto, but I said I did want onion confit on my grilled gruyere. By jove, there's no truffle oil on this?! (I don't know why my grilled cheese snobs sound British in my head.). Point being, a fancy pretentious grilled cheese with the right balance is also delicious...as long as you're not a jerk about it. 

I love the balance of salty and sweet, so if left to my own devices I add some homemade honey butter to the grill side of my bread, which is stuffed to the brim with sharp cheddar. Sometimes jam is also a welcome addition to the interior ingredients. 

Creativity is encouraged. At a late-night grilled cheese parlor in West Texas, I was introduced to an ingredient that has found a home in my grilled cheese options: the Ruffles potato chip. Hello extra crunch. Cheese it up to the maximum and throw some Cheetos in there. Do it in moderation and on occasion only, lest the crunch also finds a home in your arteries. 

My one pitfall into snobbery arises with American Cheese. American Cheese Singles freak me out, even though I've hypocritically avowed to (in moderation) graciously partake of your Superbowl Velveeta and Rotel or take a hit of your Easy Cheese on a Ritz Cracker for the sake of politeness and/or nostalgia. The Grilled Cheese, however, works its humbling powers on me. Though I prefer a sharp high-quality yellow cheddar to a Kraft Single, I'll appreciate the ooze-to-melty-stretch beauty of a good American Grilled Cheese. I'll probably even class it up by shoving some potato chips in there. 

New Year, New Cheese

I hate New Years resolutions. They're an easy way for you to feel less guilty about being a subpar human being the rest of the year. Making a resolution on January 1st is like waiting until you run out of underwear to do your laundry.

When you realize something in your life needs to be fixed, then put your man pants on and do it immediately instead of waiting around for an opportunity or excuse. So the timing of my next move and the title of my post are purely coincidental. This was a few months in the making. 

I hinted at the fact that I was starting to stagnate in my current cheese station. The purpose of moving to this city, in a nutshell, was to parlay my cheesemaking experience into learning an equally ample amount in the retail world. I needed to work with fellow cheese nerds in a real cheese shop, guided by cheese mentors who could impart their retail cheese wisdom and product knowledge on me. I wouldn't be fulfilling any of those needs being a manager of panini grilling, mac and cheese scooping, and pointing people to the house-made pre-cut cheeses. I need professional training in a store a little more focused on promoting the real star (cheese) and a lot less corporate and bent on promoting the extraneous, and often insincere, money-making foodie culture. 

I know way more about cheese than I did a year ago, but I still have a lot to learn beyond the ceiling I had hit in my current position. I'll just wait it out until I leave NYC and move on to the next thing wherever we end up, I thought. I almost fell prey to the easy route of drudging along in ever-growing frustration and belligerence  until an opportunity presented itself to me. Then, a revelation thanks to a very obvious question from a very good friend. Why don't you use your last few months here to gain experience at a different shop? Stupid, stupid. Why didn't I think of hunting that opportunity down myself sooner! No other city in the county has more opportunities to work with cheese experts in as many cheese businesses than NYC. This is a learning playground and I've just been taking repeated trips down the same slide.

So, in two weeks I'll be leaving Beecher's to take a position slinging some serious cheese at Bedford Cheese Shop. Bedford is an established shop with roots in Brooklyn that are expanding into Manhattan. It's all cheese all the time. Their cheeses are impeccably maintained, and they know their cheeses and producers...and want to teach you in a fun, welcoming way. The space is small, old school, and wreaks of delicious, stinky, cheese odors. Plus, I'll be forced to learn about imported cheeses, which I have yet to work with. In sum, I'm kind of terrified. Despite technically taking a step down from manager to good old fashioned cheesemonger, I feel unprepared for the hardcore, badass cheese shop world. But they were willing to take me on, and I jumped at the chance. Stay tuned for how it turns out and how badly I soil my pants on day one. Stay cheesy until then.