Featured Cheese - August 2020

We are delighted to share with you this month the wonderful, not-to-be-missed Montegrappa. It is a cheese with a storied history, having been made for centuries at the bottom of the 5825-foot Mount Grappa in the province of Treviso, in the Veneto region of Italy between the Venetian plains and the northern Alpine region, not far from the village of Bassano del Grappa. It shares its heritage with Asiago and Montasio DOP cheeses, whose farmers’...

Dalmatinac won the Super Gold at the World Cheese Awards in 2014 and in 2017, Dalmatinac won Silver at the same awards along with numerous other awards in all the years in between. In fact, Culture cheese magazine, America’s first and leading magazine devoted to cheese lovers, has put Dalmatinac on its list of the World’s Best 50 Cheeses.

Situated on the edge of the beautiful rolling hills of Lincolnshire Wolds, about ten miles from the United Kingdom’s coastline bordering the North Sea, lies family farm Ulceby Grange, home of Lincolnshire Poacher. The property has been in the family since 1917 and became a dairy farm in 1970 under third-generation family member, Richard Jones. Richard's son, Simon, began making cheese on the farm in 1992. The raw milk for Lincolnshire Poacher is sourced from the farm’s herd of Holstein Fresian cows. After 14-24 months of maturation, the resulting cheese is a rustic hybrid of sorts, exhibiting qualities of both an English Farmhouse Cheddar and a Swiss Alpine Comté.

Grana Padano, DOP cheese was originally made by the Cistercian Monks of Chiaravalle in the twelfth century – in the region between the Po, Ticino and Adda Rivers – as a means of not wasting fresh milk. By 1477, Grana Padano had evolved into one of Italy’s most sought-after cheeses. Until the early twentieth century, it was made in a variety of shapes, sizes, and methods. However, in the 1930s, advances in cheesemaking technology standardized production. Grana Padano is aged a minimum of 9 months, though the version we select for our club members is aged 18-20 months. The source of our Grana Padano selection is Farm 539, which is located on the border of two provinces, Parma and Piacenza, in the municipality of Villanova sull’Arda within the region of Emilia-Romagna.

Kilokaesle is a semi-firm cheese made from raw cow’s milk and aged for six months. A wheel comes in the shape of a truckle, a small cylinder. Kilokaesle is a mutschli-style cheese. Small wheels of mutschli were traditionally made when there were not enough curds to fill the large molds, or if there was not space in the cellar for the larger wheels. Sometimes the batches were so small that they could be made on the stovetop in a cheesemaker's home. While the Kilokaesle wheel may appear small, this cheese is big, chewy, and meaty in texture. Its flavors are bright and tart, like freshly cut apples, and the finish long lasting and tangy.