Fondue Fest, Fond du Lac

Oh that wacky Wisconsin.

The folks up in Fond du Lac are aiming to make it into the Guinness Book of Records for, you guessed it, the world's largest fondue. With a town name like theirs, you can't exactly blame them.

Mark your calendars for September 8th, when the whole town gets crazy for melted cheese.

Click here for the story.

And, if you're interested in attending -- becoming part of history, actually -- check out all the festivities right here.

Mount Rushmore of Cheese

We Americans are a creative, patriotic bunch. And when you throw some marketers into the mix, things really get interesting.

Ergo: a 700-lb. replica of Mount Rushmore that is currently zipping about the country. The statue is on a ten-city promotional tour, courtesy of its sponsor Cheez-Its.

Slightly odd, but kind of funny, and provocative in its own way.

Right now, Mount Cheese-more is in Michigan, according to this story from the Detroit Free Press.

Want to learn more about Troy Landwehr, the sculptor who dreamed this thing up? Click here. Turns out, the fame he's gained from this project has earned him a second commission: a cheese bust of the Prime Minister of Ireland.

Ah, so it's not just us. The Irish can be cheesy, too.

Pleasant Ridge Reserve

Wisconsin is, famously, the land of cheese.

But until the last decade or two, most of the cheese that made it out of the Badger State suffered from drabness at the expense of its own popularity. The locals got the good stuff, perhaps, but anything sold out-of-state was mostly ordinary.

No more. Today, the state is awash with cheesemaking artisans intent to make complex, top-notch cheese. And it's making its way out of the Upper Midwest to markets near you (or, at least, near me.)

Pleasant Ridge is a case in point. The cheese is full-flavored, robust and raw. It's a washed rind variety, soaked and brushed repeatedly in a salt solution during its maturation process. It's an unpasteurized cheese made from the milk of the cheesemaker's own herd of cows.

It's a Beaufort-style cheese, which is at once refined and rustic. It's an ancient style that originated in French mountains, a close cousin to Gruyére and Comté.

In the Pleasant Ridge version, it seems musty and mushroomy at first nibble. The cheese ripens from the outside in, so when you get past the pungent outer section to the creamy middle part, you savor other, fresher dairy flavors.

In other words, it's a sophisticated, complicated cheese from the Land of the Cheeseheads. Go Packers!

Sierra Nevada Wins

If you thought cream cheese must be, by definition, mass-produced and over-processed, consider Sierra Nevada Organic Cream Cheese.

This is not Philly brand.

The cheese is hand-made in small batches, and is attracting a following in northern California these days. To be sure, Sierra Nevada doesn't rank among the world's great cheeses -- the variety is just too basic -- but it's mighty tasty, nevertheless.

In fact, at the recent California State Fair, Sierra Nevada was named "Best in Show." And that was against some famous competition.

Check out the full list of winners by clicking here.

Fiscalini Purple Moon

It's hard to eat, look at, or write about this cheese without thinking of the old children's rhyme:

I never saw a purple cow
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow
I'd rather see than be one.

Rest assured, Fiscalini's widely distributed purple cheese is not made from purple cows. Rather, it's a traditional Cheddar variety that is soaked in red wine to give its rind that groovy look.

Washed-rind cheeses like this one are not exactly novelties -- plenty of styles make elegant use of the technique. Still, Fiscalini's Purple Moon is clearly meant to be playful, from the dancing (drunken?) cow on the label to the way the cheese practically shouts "Look at me!" when it's arrayed on a cheese board.

Even so, it's a well made cheese. Creamy and moderately sharp, the inner paste is rounded and full of Cheddar flavor. But the wine-washed rind adds a pleasing note of sweetness to it all. It is, as another reviewer put it, sort of "a gourmet version of Port Wine Cheddar."

That sums it up. If you're looking for a basic, flavorful gourmet Cheddar with a light-hearted feel to it, Purple Moon is worth a try. And don't worry about the purple cows.

Cal highway a gooey, cheesy mess

Interstate 80 north of Sacramento became the world's largest serving of fondue on Thursday night, when a cheese-filled tractor went up in flames, melting its contents in the process.

Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured in the accident. But a tractor full of cheese ... what a sad waste of edible potential.

Click here for the story.

The Battle for Camembert

The food fight in Normandy rages on, reports the Independent of London.

Cheesemakers there still can't agree over just what should constitute a proper Camembert. And as the paper notes, the battle lines have been growing ever sharper.

The age-old question at stake: Tradition or modernity?

Civil war is raging in the gentle, green fields of lower Normandy. Words such as "treachery" and "betrayal" and "cheat" are being hurled over the hedgerows.

When is a Camembert not a Camembert? Should 200 years of local, cheese-making tradition be micro-filtered into oblivion in the industrial vats of the French mass-market, food industry?

Click here to read the full story.

Bobolink Dairy

The wilds of northern New Jersey may be the last place many people would expect to find an artisanal cheesemaking business.

But I'm not talking about the industrial New York City suburbs. This is about bucolic, semi-rural Sussex County, home to the Bobolink Dairy. On the face of things, it's as earthy-crunchy a place as you could imagine.

Home-grown and handmade are the way to do things here. Jonathan and Nina White, both refugees from Manhattan, bought the 200-acre spread back in the 1990s. Today, they make and market a dozen kinds of cheese, hearth-bake artisanal bread for commercial release, and sell a line of grass-fed beef and veal, too.

The cheeses themselves are dense, fully textured varieties. The often out-of-stock Jean Louis swirls with lush, grassy flavors. It was even served at the White House during the Clinton years.

Bobolink's most commonly available cheese is probably its Cave-Aged Cheddar. It's creamy and sweet, sharp enough but not quite as biting as some older Cheddars from the British Isles. But it has a warm, buttery mouthfeel that wins you over in an instant.

Befitting a mom-and-pop affair, it can sometimes be hard to find the cheeses, though the Whites are present at farmer's markets throughout the New York metropolitan area, including the one in Union Square in Manhattan. Better cheesemongers in the Northeast also stock them.

You can also buy directly from the farm, via their folksy Web site. Click here for details.

Artisanal cheese in California

The Los Angeles Times has a terrific, if long, piece on the rapidly expanding California cheese business.

Here's an excerpt:

The benchmark for California cheese is higher than ever in a market that finally has caught up with a few pioneers who were way ahead of the curve. Both the flavors and types of cheeses are constantly evolving.

From the highest end (an elegant triple crème made with cow's milk crème fraîche stirred into fresh goat's milk curds) to the more accessible (a creamy farmhouse sheep's milk cheese drizzled with a little olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and cracked black pepper or a buttery, rich, handmade cheddar) — cheese-wise, probably no other state has as much to offer.

California now has the most artisan cheese producers in the country.

Click here for the full story (registration required to read it).

Shaft's Bleu

Who says you need to graze cows on the back forty to make good cheese?

Most American artisanal cheese companies spring out of a dairy farm. Usually it’s one run by the cheesemakers themselves. When sales get good enough, they sometimes buy milk from a neighboring farm, but close proximity between cheesemaker and milk source is generally a given.

Not so with the people making Shaft’s in Rocklin, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento. Their stock in trade is not milking animals, but in aging cheese. So instead of raising animals themselves, they buy their cheese young, from a farm in Wisconsin. Then they ship it to California, where it is aged in a former gold mine in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Now, in France, it is a big deal to hold the job of l’affineur – he is the guy charged with managing a cellar full of cheese until it is aged to perfection. But somehow in the United States, it’s the farmstead itself that gets a lot of the glory.

Maybe we should rethink that, at least a bit. The Shaft’s Bleu (funny French spelling and all) is a robust, full-bodied variety. It’s sweeter than, say, Roquefort, but still has plenty of tang at the back. Befitting a proper blue, it smells like the Dickens, a very good thing indeed.

Point Reyes Vintage White Cheddar

With famous siblings, it's sometimes obvious which one is the genius and which is the no-talent wannabe riding the other's coattails to fame. Think John and Jim Belushi.

Sometimes, though, it's not so clear who's who. Think of the squabbling Gallagher brothers from Oasis, or Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. It's kind of like that for this cheese from northern California's Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co.

The company's flagship variety, Original Blue, is one of the stars of the micro-cheese movement. It's wildly popular, and widely distributed as a result. But Point Reyes also makes Cheddar cheese, which is harder to find but worth the search.

Vintage White Cheddar is a big, creamy edition of the classic style. It's sharp but not bitingly so. It's not at all crumbly, as some super-aged Cheddars can be, and more sweet than dry. Its milky flavors are prominent at the forefront.

But make no mistake, this cheese is no wimp. In fact, it's a delicious, modern interpretation of an old style everybody knows well. Like all the best Cheddar, it reminds you why you love cheese in the first place.

Bubalus Bubalis

I eat a lot of cheese. Even so, when someone asks, "what's your favorite cheese?" I never hesitate: mozzarella di bufala, the extraordinary soft cheese from southern Italy.

To me, biting into a lush, creamy mozzarella fresh off the farm is to taste a bit of heaven on earth. To be precise, I mean the kind made from the milk of water buffalo, not just any old cow. (Cow's milk mozzarella, called fior di latte in Italy, is often terrific, but never sublime.)

Water buffalo, however, aren't exactly common in the cheesemaking countries. But in Campania, in the area just south of Napoli, there are herds of them, used to make this wondrous, delicate cheese.

Global supply chains are more sophisticated these days -- so importation of fresh buffalo mozzarella is routine in big U.S. cities -- but it's still mighty perishable, best eaten soon after its production.

So with an odd mix of excitement and trepidation, I've watched experiments by U.S. dairy farmers to raise water buffaloes of their own. There are two such makers. One is the Woodstock Water Buffalo Co., which makes a line of cheese and yogurt from the milk.

The other is Bubalus Bubalis, a California company that started raising its herd in 1998. The cheese -- whose quirky moniker is the Latin name for "water buffalo" -- is a noble effort to emulate the great Italian varieties. It's not quite a match for the Old Country masters, but it's a mighty fine cheese nonetheless.

By design, it's not as soft and oozy as some of the versions from Campania. Bubalus Bubalis is salted a bit more and differently, so that it's slightly firmer (but similarly rich in depth and flavor) than Mozzarella di bufala right off the boat. To me, in fact, it tastes closer to an extra-creamy type of fior di latte than a traditional di buffala.

PAIRINGS: Ripe tomatoes. Basil. Olive oil. And sliced pieces of Bubalus Bubalis. The perfect insalata caprese, California style.

Achadinha Capricious

North of San Francisco, in the hills of Marin, Sonoma and Napa, has become Cheese Central in recent years, with an ever-expanding number of artisanal producers springing up.

Achadinha, a goat cheese specialist, is one of them. Although the young company's production is small by national standards, it's worth seeking out. Because their aged variety, called Capricious, is a little marvel of depth and complexity.

(I tried it at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where they sell on weekends. If you're not near S.F., the company's Web site has ordering instructions, as well as a handy guide to pronouncing the Portuguese name "Achadinha" in English.)

It's not your father's goat cheese, at least if your father is one of those Loire Valley goat cheese makers who think the only way to make it is soft and spreadable. A semi-hard style, the Capricious is closer to Parmigiano in texture than traditional velvety fresh cheese.

That comes from aging, which adds a depth and complexity to this variety that's impossible in a soft goat cheese. The flavors are a grassy swirl, with a pleasing dryness that's tempered by the tart-sweet tastes of the milk.

PAIRINGS: Try it paired with figs, or apricots. For wine, Achadinha Capricious goes well with bone-dry Sauvignon Blancs.