Another cheese class at Whole Foods

I attended my second cheese on Monday; this class was all about blue cheese! I learned a lot at this class, here are the highlights.

How does the mold get in there? Mold, like most things, need air. So the wheels of cheese are perforated with slender, long spikes to allow air to enter the cheese. If you notice in a hunk of blue cheese there are often blue veins of mold. These are the marks from the perforation. You might also notice that there is less mold closer to the rind of the wheel, because less air is able to circulate in this area. Neat huh? Well at least I think it is neat because it is kind of the opposite of what happens in most cheeses where the mold is on the outside on the wheel and works it way inward. This is why on some cheeses you see have creamier texture closer to the rind and a firmer texture closer to the center of the wheel. That's mold doing its thing. So the perforations in blue cheese create a situation of mold gone wild.

I also learned that affinage is the term for aging cheese. An affineur or affineuse is the person who job it is to age the cheese (male cheese ager the former and female cheese ager the latter). This process is not always done by the producer of the cheese but can be an entirely separate enterprise on its own.

That familiar smell that I wrote about in my post dated October 26, 2007 (if I knew how, I'd link ya there), that smell that smells like minerals or mummy's, that may be cheese mites. I might not want to learn any more about cheese mites because they are exactly what they sound like, crawly critters.

In the class we had Monte Enebro from Spain, which is an unperforated blue. Just mold on the outside, none on the inside. It is a much milder blue and very nice indeed. We had Rouge River Blue from Oregon. This was my favorite by far. It is wrapped in pear brandy soaked grape leaves. The inside is creamy with little bursts of liquidity (probably whey) like flavor burst gums. This was followed by Bayley Hazen Blue of Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. It was a drier cheese and milder mold. They also make the Constant Bliss I had in the first class. I wonder if they accept visitors to their farm, like next spring maybe? We then tasted, side by side, Colston-Bassett Stilton and Stichelton. Both of these cheeses melt in your mouth while the blue remains on your tongue leaving tang and texture. Both are delicious but I thought the Stichelton had greater dimensionality to it. And here is the exciting back story! Stilton is a protected by the PDO (European Protected Designation of Origin) and is made from pasteurized cows milk in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire in England. This formulation was decreed in 1996. The makers of Stichelton use raw milk and are not permitted to use the name Stilton even though they are located in Nottinghamshire and prior to the PDO, Stilton was made with raw milk! So they named it Stichelton which, the story goes, is the former name of town where Stilton originated. I think that is pretty clever. Our final cheese of the evening is Herve Mons Bleu d'Auvergne which is a raw milk blue from France. To me it smelled the best. A very strong smell that screamed blue cheese. I like that. It tasted wonderful too.