Valentine's with Rush Creek

This 2/14, rather than roses and chocolates, the centerpiece on my table was cheese - Rush Creek Reserve to be specific. The raw cow's milk Vacherin Mont d’Or style cheese, debuted late last year by Uplands Cheese Co. is a rarely found style in the American cheese market (with the exception of Jasper Hill's Winnimere). This winter cheese, unctuous and creamy, tasting meaty, a little mushroomy, a bit vegetal (like broccoli), and woodsy from the Spruce bark wrapped around its exterior, is a force to be reckoned with. I brought this cheese to both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but Valentine's was by far the ripest. (Last of the season I later learned). Hands down, a cheese that begs to be shared.

While amazing on its own, the experience was only further enhanced by Blossom Bluff's dried Spring Bright yellow nectarines, locally grown almonds, and a crisp, mineraly Ligurian white. Sadly we won't be seeing this cheese again until late 2011. While it will be missed, the chilly Winter days and holiday excitement I now associate with Rush Creek hold even more impact and (hopefully, soon) memories than any other exceptional cheese I can purchase year-round. Definitely a treat well worth waiting for. As they say, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder".

Hairy Cheese?

As a cheese monger I get a lot of interesting questions.
Most recently I had a man tell me that he had been to France and had eaten a cheese that had hair on it (and wanted to know if we carried it). My first thought was that some sneaky Frenchman had accidentally dropped a wedge on the floor and decided to pass it off as a delicacy to some unwitting tourist. But not wanting to burst his bubble (or make him sick),  I told him that cheese could not grow hair. He again stated that this cheese was growing hair. "Maybe it was some unique looking mold", I suggested. At this point he seemed a bit frustrated and told me that he "knows what mold looks like" and this was not. Obviously I was not going to convince this man that cheeses lack the essential follicles to grow hair, so I directed him to the French cheese section with the warning "I don't think we carry it". "That's ok", he said. "It's probably illegal here."
I hope so.
Nonetheless I was intrigued. Initially when he said "hair" I pictured the slightly longer-than-average fuzz that can occur on bloomy rinded cheeses, like I've seen on Vermont Butter and Cheese's Coupole. But after some research I found that there is a mold called poil de chat, or cat's hair mold, that looks like the tumbleweeds of cat fur that careen across the floor when Spring is near. It sometimes makes its home on cheese.
While I first found this man's question silly and (snobishly, on my part) ignorrant, I am glad he asked. Not only did I learn something new about cheese (poil de chat can be toxic by the way. If your cheese looks like your pet has been shedding on it, don't try to "save" it with scraping), it also reminded me that there is still so much to teach the public about cheese. In all of its unique forms, cheese is so much more than a cryovaced brick - it's a living food, and I think an essential part of instilling a real food culture and system in America.
Cheese is alive, yes, but still not capable of growing hair.

Begin

Ahoy!
First post here. Cheese Press is going to be an easygoing blog about the exciting world of cheese and all that it can encompass: cooking with cheese, drinking with it, making it (and the people who make it so well), new and fun cheesy bits, experiments, and occasionally what I like to call cheese porn.
I am mainly doing this for myself and for fun, but if this turns out to be interesting enough that anyone wants to follow, that's great too! Working at one of the best cheese shops in the country, I get to taste, work with and evaluate some of the best cheeses the States and Europe have to offer. I also get to meet some of the most interesting and important people in the business. (If you know anything about the field, you know there are celebrities...) My knowledge and experience mainly lies in the American artisan so I will mostly be posting about that, but hopefully this will be an opportunity for me to branch out and learn more.
In the meantime I hope to get some pictures up and work on the layout a bit (first time blogger, here). First up I'm planning on profiling Sunset Bay from Rivers Edge Chevre, a new (to me) Oregon goat cheese that pretty much knocked me out of my chair and had me returning for more an embarrassing amount of times, all while grumbling about why we don't carry it in the shop and making a multitude of unflattering cheese-ecstacy faces. Hopefully Pat, the cheese maker, took it as a compliment, or at least was amused, and wasn't annoyed. I'll do anything for cheese...