Entries associated with the tag "Meadow Creek Dairy":

"I don't think there's a cheese out there that at least somebody doesn't like."
 --Marcel Gravel, Cabot Creamery

That was the plant manager from Vermont's largest cheese maker on Friday during a panel discussion on the economics of affinage at the American Cheese Society conference. I knew there had to be some explanation for the existence of inconceivable crimes against nature such as smoked salmon cheddar and strawberry-chardonnay cheddar, both ribbon winners in their respective categories in ACS's annual cheese competition.

At Saturday's Festival of Cheese those and over a thousand other competition entries from cheese makers all over the U.S. and Canada were cut and laid out in the Chicago Hilton's grand ballroom. Fish cheese aside, an impossible number of these were very fine indeed, including two second-place red ribbon winners from our old pal Willi Lehner. It was a challenge to sample thoughtfully among all this cheesy splendor--about the only spot in the room that wasn't mobbed with turophiles was the deserted low-fat, low-salt cheese table.

Some of my favorites: Vermont Butter & Cheese Company's cultured butter with sea salt, Utah's Beehive Cheese Company's espresso-lavender-rubbed cheddar, and Virginia's Meadow Creek Dairy farmstead Grayson, which I had the great good fortune to try earlier in the week melted on a pizza created by the talented Mark Bello. 

The big local angle here is that Wisconsin cheese makers took away a whopping 91 ribbons in the competition, a third of all the prizes. Sid Cook of Carr Valley Cheese Company won 18 of them, including Best in Show for his Snow White Goat Cheddar, and third runner-up for Cave Aged Marisa. Other local winners: downstate Prairie Fruits Farm took third in soft ripened goat's milk cheeses for their Little Bloom on the Prairie, and Indiana's Capriole took first in flavored goat cheeses for perennial favorite O'Banon. Both are available at the Green City Market.

Many winning cheeses were absent from Sunday's clearance sale at Kendall College, but if you were quick and ruthless you could get some fantastic deals. I scored a four-pound chunk of Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar for ten bucks. I shudder to think of what this red-ribbon-winning hunk of raw milk wonder would have cost at retail.

I want nothing more today than a bucketful of raw cabbage.

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.”