Featured Cheese - December 2018

Point Reyes Toma is all natural and made with cow milk, as well as being gluten-free and made with microbial (vegetarian) rennet. This semi-firm cheese is creamy with buttery flavor with a grassy tang finish making it the perfect cheese to go with just about anything. Toma also means “cheese made by the farmer himself” in Italian and that’s fitting as it’s made by a family-run dairy farm and creamery in Marin County.

Carr Valley Cheese has been making cheese in Wisconsin for over a century and they’ve become one of the finest specialty cheese manufacturers in the States. Glacier Wildfire Blue is a soft to semi-soft cheese, and this ‘hot’ blue is mild to medium in heat but still has the creamy, crisp, and clean flavors of a regular blue that will melt in your mouth. Add this crumbly cheese to sauces, mac and cheese or anything you want to kick up a notch. It will pair very well with wines like Viognier and Chardonnay and moderately hoppy beers like an American Pale Ale.

Purple Haze is a fresh goat’s milk cheese flavored with lavender buds and wild harvested fennel pollen. The name, inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s classic song, reflects more of the appearance rather than the taste of the cheese. This chevre has a sweet, flowery (but not overwhelming) flavor of soft, creamy texture. Pair it with crackers, ripe figs or Zinfandel.

This Spanish firm mixed milk cheese is aged 6 months and uses a minimum of high quality 60% cow’s milk, 20% sheep’s milk, and 6% goat’s milk collected from local farms. While the cheese is being aged, the rind is repeatedly brushed and rubbed with olive oil, leading to herbal, vegetal and peppery aromas and flavors. The paste is light yellow with small eyes. The finish is particularly interesting, reminding us of savory bay leaves. Los Cameros Red Label pairs well with dry red wines and is traditionally paired with a fruit Dulce de Membrillo, a popular Spanish paste made from quince.

This soft goat cheese won 1st in its class at the American Cheese Society awards in both 2015 and 2017. It’s a bloomy rind cheese with a wrinkly rind and white paste. The cream line, just under the rind, will age from the outside in and become creamier and creamier as it ages. The paste is soft and melts on your tongue. It's buttery in flavor and as clean as goat cheese comes.

Home to a wide array of livestock including more than 42 registered Jersey Holstein milking cows that produce over 600,000 pounds of milk each year, Spring Brook Farm is a 1,000 acre dairy farm that produces award-winning farmhouse cheeses. In fact, their Tarentaise cheese featured this month has won no less than 22 national and international awards to date, including the most recent honors of taking first place in the Farmstead Category Aged 60 days or more at the 2018 American Cheese Society show, and an extra-aged version taking Best of Show at the same event in 2017.