Love & Cheese

If you're like me, then Valentine's Day is an excuse to encourage your inner glutton with an indulgent, yet guilt-free, meal. You know, like President's Day, Labor Day, Arbor Day, Remembrance Day...Guy Fawkes Day? Okay, so if you're really like me, you don't need an excuse for a truly memorable food experience -- be it a fresh, greasy one-of-a-kind burger or an innovative multi-course meal. In fact, most of you probably don't find much romance in bloating, tight pants, and pushing yourself to the brink of eating stamina. For me, love is a judgment-free belly rub.

On Valentine's Day, however, romance truly is universally expressed in indulgence. Elaborate flowers, jewelry, an expensive dinner, chocolates -- each plays its part as an aphrodisiac. A means to your evening's happy end. Now you can add cheese into the love mix. Just ask the Italian women who ate Islay Dunlop cheese. Aphrodisiac qualities from phenylethylamine are even more potent in cheese than chocolate. Chemically the compound affects brain stems of cheese fiends and non-fiends, the fatties and the restrained all the same. It's not just me this time. Cheese is love. Science says so.

Maybe a big block of blue cheese doesn't scream allure, especially if you're a cheese-hater. Yet, for those with a stronger sense of culinary adventure and tolerance for your date's milk-breath and mild flatulence, nothing says I love you like a good lust-worthy cheese course.

Cheese is usually best suited for a dessert course, or immediately following or preceding a more traditional dessert course. Cheese and chocolate are also an ideal pairing (perhaps with a sweeter firm Alpine cheese or a nutty sheep cheese like Manchego), and can be accompanied by a good red wine. If you're really adventurous, try a stronger stand-alone course. Get a really good blue cheese for a match made in heaven with Sauternes, a French dessert wine available in mid-range quality at about $40 a bottle. Add some honey and dried figs into the flavor experience--both also believed to have aphrodisiac qualities. And thank your taste buds for existing. Rogue River makes some of my favorite blue cheese. There is also an Italian blue cheese washed in a dessert wine called Basajo. If you can find it, then paired with a sweet wine, honey, fig combo, it is one of the best desserts I've ever had. There is a French blue cheese that is washed in Sauternes that would also be an ideal fit.

Sure, I have a personal and peculiar love affair with cheese. It was, after all, last Valentine's Day weekend, encouraged by my real life human love, that I visited Connecticut for my first ever cheesemaking experience. And it has been my motto since college that "cheese is my first love; bacon is my mistress."  Still, the chemical power and creative potential of cheese and other foods like it is truly universal. Even if you're single, with a group of friends, or a general hater of the holiday of love with some principled vendetta against Hallmark, recognize this day as an opportunity to experience and experiment with the joy and pleasure of food and flavors. Cheese is there for you for this purpose. Just like it has always been there for me.

The Littlest Fish (Part 2)

...Last week I found out an organization called Ecotrust was hosting a pairing and tasting event in Portland on Wednesday. The event, Wine-Pear-Cheese, matched a cheesemaker and a winemaker with a type of regional pear and a local chef.  There were five pairing teams.  Each team's chef had to bring all three pairing components together and create an appetizer using the pear, cheese and wine. The 120 attendees at the sold-out event were going to be divided into five groups, and each group would rotate between pairing teams for a tasting. For several logistical reasons, including my inability to drive a stick-shift, I was the only person available from Black Sheep to represent the cheese at the tasting.

Each chef was a well-known, established, food star on the local food scene. Each wine and cheese was being repped by the expert-artisan, a distributor, or someone with a lot of experience in the production. Everyone was kind of a big deal. Then, there was me. I only outranked the little kid who tagged along with his dad, one of the cheesemakers on the other team. Not only did I have to appear knowledgeable to a crowd of people who paid for this event, but I also had to try not to disappear in the shadows of folks who had years and years of credentials.

I arrived at our chef's cafe with my cooler full of cheese to catch a ride with the chef. One of the cooks came out front to greet me, I presumed.  I went to shake his hand and he asked if I was there to work. "Oh uhm, nuh, umm, no. I'm. Cheese. I'm just here with the cheese." Still confused, I followed him back to the kitchen, where I met the chef. Due to a clock malfunction, the kitchen was a bit behind on preparations. So I was immediately put to work helping prep the appetizers to take to the event. I did not expect to have first experience presenting at a tasting and working in a commercial kitchen that day. 

We loaded up and arrived at the event. Our team discussed our presentation flow and tried to figure out the best way to handle the groups. I had a few notes on the farm and its history, but soon realized I also needed to guide the attendees on the flavors they were picking up in the cheese. It was, after all, a tasting event. I went off to my corner and started tasting our cheese, a Spanish-style cheese that had recently won an award at ACS. Generally I could say it was modeled after an unsmoked Idiazabal cheese and that it had a mild, slightly-nutty quality. But I had to come up with something better than that. I immediately pulled from the catalog of knowledge they gave us in the sensory class at VIAC (I guess cheese school came in handy after-all). I noticed the initial notes of mellow citrus-fruitiness that paired well with the pears, followed by the earthy, meaty quality as you got closer to the rind that paired well with the Cabernet. I have no idea if that sounded reasonable, but people seemed to politely nod their head in agreement. 

After the first few groups passed through, we all got the hang of the presentations. At first, I did have to assert myself in trying to seem like somewhat of a big of a deal. The first couple of times my presentation was skipped until after the group had lined up for the samples. Such a set-up did not give the cheese a fair share of the spotlight, so I had to make sure I wasn't just the intern in the corner. No, I was an advocate for the cheese and I would be heard! After the first groups, I had established my role and felt much more comfortable. I realized I was pretty knowledgeable (or knowledgeable enough) about what people wanted to know.

The event turned out be quite exhilarating and fun. Meg arrived at the very end of the fifth presentation to pick me up. I'm glad she was there, not just as a warm familiar face, but also to tell me if anything I was saying was way off. She fully supported my presentation spiel. Getting the thumbs up from the boss is always a good feeling. 

The attendees also voted that our paring was the best of the five. That likely had much more to do with the flavors of the products than any of the presentations. But I think that gives me some cheese cred.