Entries associated with the tag "Harold McGee":

In the early 90s there were fewer than ten raw milk cheese makers in the U.S. At this year’s American Cheese Society meeting, held in Burlington, Vermont, in August, almost half of the 200 producers who entered the competition had a raw milk cheese offering.

Before 1862, when Louis Pasteur determined that heating and refrigerating milk could kill harmful pathogens, all cheese was made with raw milk. Since then there has been continuing pressure to pasteurize all milk products, though in 1949 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration OK'd the use of raw milk for cheese as long as the cheese was aged 60 days. As Judy Schad of Indiana-based Capriole Farmstead Goat Cheeses explained in a presentation at Pastoral the other night, a 60-day aging period ensures that “good” bacteria overgrows “bad” bacteria, such as listeria and salmonella, which are also destroyed as the cheese product becomes progressively more acidic.

In the view of professionals like Schad, as well as food scientists such as Harold McGee and artisan cheese chroniclers and Slow Food enthusiasts such as Jeffrey Roberts, you can make a very good cheese using pasteurized milk. Consensus, however, seems to be that raw milk is more conducive to truly great cheese. Natural flora – which varies by factors such as terrain, the grasses grazed upon, and the time of year – are what give cheeses made from raw milk a distinctive terroir, an indelible taste of the land. These unique flavor compounds are frequently processed out during pasteurization.

As part of her presentation, Schad walked us through a number of cheeses; two that stood out for me were the Grayson from Meadow Creek Dairy and Mont Saint Francis under Schad’s own Capriole label, both raw milk products. These are some serious cheeses: if you search “stinky” on the Web site for Artisanal Premium Cheeses, these two are at the top of the list.

Grayson is made of raw cow’s milk from Meadow Creek’s farm in Galax, Virginia. It’s “washed rind,” which means the cheese makers stimulate the surface growth of B. linens (Brevibacterium linens) by rinsing the cheese in brine; the cheese, in effect, ripens from the outside in. The Southern Foodways Alliance named this cheese one of its top ten southern cheeses, praising it with words such as “very strong smelling, funky” and “barny and earthy.” I found it powerfully buttery and pleasingly minerally around the edge. Schad described it as akin to a “creamy Gruyere,” though that may understate its potency. I found it a match for a big red wine, both cheese and wine holding their own as they duked it out in my mouth.

Schad called her Mont Saint Francis “a backseat cheese,” meaning that when you drive home with it, you’d best put it in the trunk to avoid being knocked off the road by its assertive and alluring aroma. This raw farmstead goat’s milk cheese, produced in the Kentuckiana region of Indiana, also has a washed rind, and is semihard with a mellow flavor you wouldn’t anticipate if you went by smell alone. Somewhat salty, it tingles the tongue and has an almost crumbly texture. When it comes to pairing drink with this cheese, Schad doesn’t mess around: she suggests bourbon or a bitter beer as accompaniments.  You definitely something with enough backbone to withstand the gustatory onslaught.

Pastoral, at 2954 N. Broadway, carries both Meadow Creek Dairy’s Grayson and Capriole’s Mont Saint Francis, at $19.99 and $25.95, respectively. Obviously that’s a hell of a lot more than you’d pay for a block of cheddar at the grocery store, but as Daniel Sirko, Pastoral’s fromager, says, “These are artisan products; they’re very labor intensive and express a depth that’s not possible with a commodity product. It’s like the difference between a handmade suit and something off-the-rack, or an original painting and a reproduction.”

I asked Greg O’Neill, owner/proprietor of Pastoral (2945 N Broadway) to name his favorite cheese, and he chose Rondo, a goat’s/cow’s milk blend that he described as a “magical combination of tartness and creaminess with a signature feel and simple elegance.”

Rondo is produced by Soyoung Scanlan of Andante Dairy, an artisanal cheesemaker out of Petaluma, California. She has composed Rondo to have the “brightness of a goat's milk cheese and the mouthfeel of a cow's milk cheese.”  It is, indeed, a wonderful cheese: luxurious, but with a tang that gives snap to the silkiness.  The skin is remarkably delicate and flavorful, with a depth of taste and the lingering scent of California fields and goats that have been loved. 

Scanlan--a former music student--gives her cheeses musical names: Metronome, Acapella, Pianoforte The name of the dairy itself suggests a moderate pace, a slower speed, appropriate for the making of cheese – and, apparently, negotiating contracts with vendors. Pastoral is the only specialty cheese store in the city to carry Scanlan’s cheese, and it took two years to actually get her cheese into the shop.

In early 2004. Harold McGee was in Chicago to promote a 20th anniversary edition of his masterpiece, On Food and Cooking. During the Kennedy administration, McGee and I were in the same communion class in Elmhurst, Illinois, and we had emailed back and forth before meeting up in Chicago to do an interview for a segment of Gorilla Gourmet, produced by my friend Mike Gebert. After the interview, we stopped in at Pastoral. Scanlon, a friend of McGee’s, had asked him to check out the new cheese store while he was in town to see if it was suitable for her product.  It wasn't until he deemed it acceptable that the wheels started to turn. Now Pastoral offers several Andante cheeses, including Rondo, one called Piccolo, and another called Pastoral (Named for the shop?  Greg says probably not, but if Scanlon was naming cheeses after strictly musical terms, she would have called this cheese Pastorale, so who knows?)

In the picture above, Rondo is on the left and Pastoral is on the right; holding both cheeses is Daniel Sirko, fromager at Pastoral and 2005 American Cheese Society judge.

Scanlan is very protective of her cheese; says Sirko explains, “she wants what we’re selling to always be the best example of what she’s making.”  That’s why Scanlan asked McGee to do recon for her: she wanted to be sure that Pastoral had the would handle her creations with care--artisanal cheeses should be rewrapped daily, kept at the right temperature, and cut to order.

In an interview with Lynne Rossetto Kasper of Splendid Table, Scanlon explained that cheese making is like playing the piano: “for certain parts you have to be really gentle, and at certain parts you have to be very straightforward and put your energy (into it)….The whole goal of cheese making for me is expressing the beauty of milk.” 

In addition to Pastoral and other specialty cheese stores, Andante Dairy cheeses are available in several high end restaurants, including Thomas Keller's French Laundry and Per Se--but none in Chicago.

If you had more than the usual trouble getting a table at Blackbird, Avec, Alinea, Frontera, Hot Doug's or any other local celebstaurant last week, it's likely because they were already booked up by thousands of out of town chefs, food writers, marketers, photographers, and entrepreneurs here for the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. The four-day schedule of talks, workshops, tasting, tours, and dinners was thoroughly interesting, convivial, and so huge that it was damn near impossible to do anything without missing three or four other really cool programs.

This was particularly painful on Thursday morning, as I stood in the Hilton lobby trying to decide between cod, raw milk cheese, and butter tastings, a discussion on herbs and spices with Madhur Jaffrey, and a localism panel with Erika Lesser of Slow Food USA. I settled instead on "The Doctor is In" a Q & A with food science gurus Shirley O. Corriher and Harold McGee, in large part because ten years ago I'd been given Corriher's demystifying Cookwise at a formative time in my life (I'd forsworn vegetarianism), and it quickly became my best friend in the kitchen. The jolly, cherubic Corriher and gaunt, wry McGee had a winning Julia and Jacques-like chemistry as they fielded tough technical questions about brining, natural and unnatural transfats, and what it means when chopped garlic goes green (it's really fresh from high protein soil). Someone asked about how to work with flours with unknown protein content and Corriher said that in the old days German bakers would thrust a sweaty arm in the barrel. If the flour stuck to the arm they knew they were dealing with low protein stuff. The session provided the first of many we're-all-in-this-together, geek-out moments when Italophile Faith Willinger, in large metal cow earrings, rose from the crowd to ask what she could do to improve her zabaglione when she couldn't get Italian eggs (the answer: use extra yolks). 

I followed that with Going Underground: Roots, Rhizomes, and Tubers in Asian Cooking with Viet World Kitchen's Andrea Nguyen, Saveur editor James Oseland and Elizabeth Andoh, whose presentation on konnyaku, "the ugly duckling of the Japanese kitchen" was bizarre and fascinating. This highly fibrous, zero-cal "elephant yam" is extremely labor intensive to produce; it requires three transplants over three years before it's mature, it smells repulsive when it's pollinating, and it has to be processed with an alkaline liquid before it can be digested. If you buy a package that smells sweet it's spoiled--if it's fresh it smells bad. At some point I realized that I had eaten this last year, extruded into noodles. The flavorless end product has a good chew, is an ideal flavor absorber, and has been used for centuries in Japan--there were 82 recipes in a 1864 cookbook and 80 of them are still used. But as Andoh marveled, "Who had the courage to think you could eat it?"

For me, Friday's panel with Rick Bayless and Donald Bixby of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy about the Renewing America's Food Traditions project (RAFT), and cooking heritage breeds was the most hopeful and inspiring segment of the conference. Bixby explained how the heritage breed movement got its start in the 70s, when bunch of agricultural historians working on bicentennial commemorations discovered that they couldn't find any any of the breeds our forefathers raised. Back then their few stewards were hobbyists who just thought it was cool to raise Buckeye chickens, Pineywoods cattle, or Mulefoot hogs, and for whom the thought of eating the endangered (but tasty) animals was counterinterintuitive. But eventually the idea that "You have to eat them to save them" prevailed--an idea Erika Lesser called "eater-based conservation. " Bayless explained that people will reconnect with these animals first through restaurants, so chefs have a serious responsibility to work with farmers, and learn how to properly prepare the animals before foisting them on to the eating public. And it ain't easy. You can't just throw a Buckeye into the pot and expect it to taste right. Bayless said his kitchen tested chickens from Lagrange's Gunthorp Farms for nine months before they appeared on the menu at Frontera (gotta brine them first). It took a year before they could figure out how to get grass-fed beef on the menu--but it was worth it. Now the grass-fed (and more expensive) carne asada outsells the the regular one, which he said was the biggest selling weekend item for 20 years. Bixby summed it up: "Education starts with the chefs." 

Bayless, incidentally, won the IACP's 2007 Humanitarian Award, recognizing "individuals who have contributed significantly to improving conditions for the underprivileged in our society," for his work with the Frontera Farmer Foundation.

My conference ended with a butchering workshop at Kendall College on Saturday conducted by David and Michael Brown, two soft-spoken Canadian brothers who had just three hours to teach 40 inquisitive, and at that point rather cranky conference goers how to cut blade steaks, top sirloin, lamb shoulder, and chicken. This was a lot of fun, and if nothing else underscored the fact that the craft of butchering takes years to master. Oh yeah, and that the infinitive "to butcher" is not as relative as it should be. You can see the atrocity I committed trying to butterfly a pork loin in the attached pictures.