June 2024 Newsletter
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| Table of Contents1. Welcome 2. Cheese News 3. Upcoming Events 4. Cheese Tip of the Month: Cheese Rinds 6. A Cheesy Story: Goat Oasis in the Shadow of Rainier |
| Welcome!June is in full swing as this newsletter lands in your inbox, so clearly this has been a busy month for us already. Courtney just returned from a week in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she judged cheese for the American Cheese Society’s Judging & Competition—the contest that decides the best cheese in America each year. (The winners won’t be announced until the society’s annual conference in July, so stay tuned!) We also recently finished another round of commercial real estate tours, and we are in the process of putting in some new bids on spaces for the shop. We are really excited for this move. Fingers crossed we have found “the one.” Most importantly, June is Washington Cheese Month. For the second year in a row, this designation has given us another excuse to sing the praises of our local cheesemakers and the delicious cheeses they craft. We began the celebration by pulling together a banger of a selection for our June Cheese of the Month Club release. |
The Halloumi we selected for the Brewers Festival is from Tieton Farm & Creamery in Tieton, Washington. It’s a traditional sheep-and-goat, mixed-milk Halloumi that allows us to continue celebrating Washington Cheese Month along with Pride Month, as Tieton Farm & Creamery is an LGBTQ-owned business (and also women-owned, solar-powered, farmstead, artisanal, etc.). Tieton is one of our favorite cheesemakers in the state, and their cheeses are a staple at many of the local farmers markets. We hope everyone attending the Brewers Festival will stop by our booth to snag a Halloumi plate to try this tasty cheese in action.
We hope you’ll read on in this newsletter to learn more about fun cheeses we are excited about this month, our upcoming events, and a little story from our visit to Mountain Lodge Farm in Eatonville. Thank you so much for subscribing to our newsletter and for being curious about cheese.
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Cheers and Cheese,
Tailor & Courtney
Cheese News
| This month’s selection includes some fantastic favorites we haven’t had in stock in a while, as well as some new-to-us cheeses we are honored to share.Cherry Valley Dairy Gray Salt Butter, Herbed Rose Butter, and Ghee. Pasteurized cow, cultured butter, Duvall, WA. Cherry Valley makes some of the most awarded cultured butter in the country. Their Herbed Rose Butter in particular has earned the gold medal in the flavored butter category every year it’s been entered into the American Cheese Society’s Judging & Competition. Cherry Valley is a small, sustainable farmstead creamery that makes cheese and butter with milk from their Jersey cow herd—meaning the milk is bright gold in color and sumptuously dense and creamy. Mountain Lodge Farm Fryingpan Halloumi. Pasteurized goat, brine-cured cheese, Eatonville, WA. Perfectly seasoned with Mediterranean herbs, this Halloumi achieves buttery richness when grilled to perfection. You don’t have to have an outdoor grill to prepare this cheese; you can cook it on a griddle or non-stick pan on the stove, or you can broil it in the oven—or just slice it to eat or shave onto a watermelon salad.Lum Farm Minnie’s Marinated Chèvre and Cajeta. Pasteurized goat, soft fresh cheese in olive oil with garlic and herbs and caramel, Eastsound, WA. It’s always a treat when we can get Lum Farm’s cheeses. They keep perfecting the recipe for their marinated Chèvre, the only marinated soft cheese being made in Washington right now. It’s perfect for spreading on just about anything, and you can use the leftover oil for pastas and salads. If you’ve been following us on social media for a while, you already know we are passionate about the Cajeta. This caramel sauce is liquid gold, and we will pair it with fresh fruit, ice cream, cookies, and even other cheeses.Samish Bay Cheese Vache. Pasteurized cow, soft fresh cheese, Bow, WA. Made in a style similar to fresh Chèvre, but from cow’s milk instead of goat’s (hence the name Vache, which is French for cow—just as Chèvre is French for goat), this cheese is creamy, dense, and perfect for schmearing. You can also use this cheese for cooking and baking, and it’s superb paired with a bit of olive oil or balsamic vinegar and a little coarse sea salt—or with fruit preserves.Landmark Creamery Sweet Annie. Pasteurized sheep, aged Gouda, Wisconsin. Sweet Annie is a classic aged-Gouda style cheese made from beautiful sheep’s milk in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. This cheese has all the flavor and aroma notes you’d expect in a Gouda with good age: butterscotch, caramel, and toasted nuts on a base of fresh cream. This firm cheese with an orange, candy-colored rind is perfect for slicing, chunking, shredding, or shaving. Coming soon: Jasper Hill Farm Campfire Harbison. Pasteurized cow, soft-ripened bloomy-rind cheese wrapped in smoked spruce bark, Vermont. For the second year in a row, we are excited to bring in this seasonal, smoky version of the original Harbison we all know and love. As with the regular cheese, you just slice the top off and scoop out the delectable, gooey cheese within. The addition of a gentle smoke flavor from the liquid smoke-soaked spruce cambium bark makes this cheese perfect for the coming of summer: dip some veggies in it, drizzle it over grilled chicken, or use it to top a hot dog. Coming soon: Gourmino Rockflower. Raw cow, Alpine-style cooked pressed cheese, Switzerland. Aged in Swiss mountain caves by the same folks who brought us Rahmtaler this spring, Rockflower is a dense, firm cheese aged 9-12 months that is great melted or shredded and incorporated into a dish, or cut up for a cheese board. Its cooked cream flavor profile is accented by notes of pine nuts, umami, and Alpine flowers. Plus, our baby cheesemonger mentee, Jeremy, is using the Gourmino Rockflower in his drink pairing for the upcoming Cheesemonger Invitational competition in New York on June 23. Come get a taste of this cheese and send him all the good vibes for the competition! |
| Street Cheese Online Store |
Here are the remaining opportunities to get cheesy with us this June, and a sneak peak at our July events:Pop-Up Cheese Shop: Thursday, June 13, from 4-7 p.m. at Discover Burien in Downtown Burien (611 SW 152nd St). We will be set up to sell cheese by the wedge or wheel, charcuterie by the chub or sliced-to-order, and accompaniments to go with your cheese or meal. To place a pre-order head to our web store:
Street Cheese Online Store
The Cheese Course: Washington: Saturday, June 15, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at The Pantry in Ballard (1417 NW 70th St). In honor of Washington Cheese Month, this class is a guided tasting of cheeses made by local cheesemakers throughout our state. Each cheese will be paired with a local accompaniment. Tickets are $100 each and are available through The Pantry website:
The Pantry – The Cheese Course: Washington
Washington Brewers Fest: Saturday, June 22, and Sunday, June 23, from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Seattle Center Fisher Pavilion (305 Harrison St). We’ll be selling grilled Halloumi plates and cheese by the wedge. Folks who sign up for VIP access will also receive a cheese plate we’ve prepared featuring all local cheeses. Tickets for drinkers cost $49 to $99, and designated driver tickets cost $15 to $30. To purchase tickets for either or both days, visit the Washington Brewers Guild website:
Washington Brewers Fest 2024
Pop-Up Cheese Shop: Thursday, June 27, and again on Saturday, July 13, both from 4-7 p.m. at Discover Burien in Downtown Burien (611 SW 152nd St). Same drill as on June 13. The July Pop-Up is also the official release date for our July Cheese of the Month Club. To place a pre-order for pick-up during either Pop-Up or to sign up for our Cheese Club, head to our web store:
Street Cheese Online Store
Swedish Cheese Tasting with Almnäs Bruk: Together with our friends at Skål Beer Hall (5429 Ballard Ave NW), we are honored to host Thomas Berglund, owner of Almnäs Bruk creamery in Sweden, for an evening of cheese tasting, cheese pairing, and storytelling. Tickets will be available through Skål’s website shortly.
Fine Cider & Cheese Pairing Class: We return to Republic of Cider (2960 4th Ave S #109) for an evening of fine cider and cheese tasting. The tasting menus are always interesting for our classes here, as the mad scientist fermenters of Republic of Cider keep experimenting and making cool things to drink. To purchase tickets, head to Republic of Cider’s website:
Republic of Cider – Fine Cider & Cheese Tasting
Cheese Tip of the Month: Cheese Rinds
Most cheese rinds are edible, but not all. Sometimes it can be hard to know which ones you can put in your mouth and which ones you should eat around. Here are some guidelines to help navigate minding the rind:Plastic, wax, and foil are probably obvious nopes. Keep in mind also that some rinds are not immediately visible, or you might not realize they are not part of the cheese. Colored wax coatings and plastic coats are easily removed, as is tinfoil used on many blue cheeses. These foreign materials are applied to the outside of cheese wheels to protect them from unwanted mold growth and excess moisture loss while allowing the cheese to breathe as it ages. Some cheeses do have a waxy rind that is painted onto them, or into which they’ve been dipped. That’s most common in Manchego cheeses and some harder, aged American cheeses. When in doubt, ask your cheesemonger.
It’s just waiting to crack a tooth, so don’t let it. Parmigiano Reggiano, Grana Padano, Mimolette and other hard cheese rinds are technical natural, but not immediately edible. They are super hard, protective layers that naturally form on the outside of the cheese as it ages over an extended period of time. Parm and Grana rinds can be saved in the freezer and thrown into soups and stocks to add flavor, or you can pop them in the microwave for a minute to puff them up and make them chewy. Rinds with lots of cheese mite activity (the ones that look like lava rock) are also technically edible, but really just not very appetizing.
It’s bound in cloth and needs to be undressed. Most clothbound cheeses you buy in a wedge will have the cloth binding removed, but sometimes part or all of it remains. This is a muslin or cheese cloth layer that’s been wrapped around the young wheel of cheese and sealed with butter or lard to help maintain moisture inside the cheese as it ages while allowing it to breathe. It can be hard to tell if the cloth is still present, as the cloth often leaves little hatch marks on the outside of cheeses where it has been applied (typically traditional English Cheddars or their American counterparts). Even on some wheels where the cloth has been recently removed, there may still be a few strings left behind. You should be able to just peel off the cloth; once you ensure there are no strings left, the rind is edible if you want to eat it.
Natural rinds are almost always edible. The white mold rinds on brie- and camembert-style cheeses, the pink or orange sticky rinds on washed-rind cheeses, and the beige to brown rinds on many firmer, aged cheeses grew on the cheese, and the cheesemaker or affineur spent a lot of time and energy helping those rinds to form in the way that they did. These rinds are edible, and some people enjoy eating them. The rind can offer aromas and flavors that are different from those found inside the cheese, and they give part of the terroir, or taste of place, of the cheese and help tell the story of where it is from.As with all things, taste is a matter of personal preference. While we always recommend you try edible cheese rinds, you don’t have to enjoy them or keep eating a rind you don’t like. And that’s OK!
A Cheesy Story: Goat Oasis in the Shadow of Rainier
It was early February when we made the drive out to Eatonville to go see some goats. Sherwin Ferguson, owner of Mountain Lodge Farm, had invited us out to see where the creamery’s cheeses come from. The seasonal, farmstead creamery wasn’t producing cheese at the time—they didn’t even have milk yet, as the first baby goats of the year were not scheduled to be born until the day after our visit—but the experience got us excited to begin ordering the farm’s cheeses as soon as we could this spring.
Mountain Lodge has been producing cheese for over a decade now. The farm started as a second career for Sherwin, who had worked in the medical field and decided to spend more time working with animals in her second act. She built up a small herd of Nigerian Dwarf and La Mancha goats that live in the most beautiful, still mostly wild, 87-acre farm in the Cascade Foothills. In the early 2010s, the creamery recruited Meghan McKenna, who had been a cheesemonger at Metropolitan Market—the company whose cheese counters we both cut our cheese teeth in and where we met—and who was a budding talented cheesemaker. Together with Sherwin’s brother, Meghan perfected the creamery’s recipes for soft-ripened, bloomy-rind cheeses and helped them earn a name in the local markets.
A talented cheesemaker who went on to work at Cherry Valley Dairy and now at Bella Luna Farm in Snohomish, Meghan left the cheesemaking duties at Mountain Lodge Farm to the current team who carries on and continues refining the craft of artisanal cheesemaking on the farm. The goats are raised in pastures and barns about 50 feet from the creamery, and the farm’s small team of herders and cheesemakers work together to transform the lush mountain goat’s milk into a high-quality product that is seasonally available in the Puget Sound region in the summer and fall.
Sherwin is incredibly passionate about animal husbandry. As a former nurse practitioner, she is very concerned about the health of her herd, and she discussed new strategies the farm was trying out to continuously improve the animals’ well-being and the quality of their milk. She even has a retirement home for the older animals on the farm, who get to live in a Garden of Eden setting on the higher reaches of the property near the main house where Sherwin and her husband live. The farm also has a herd of Black Welsh Mountain sheep and a legion of llamas and guard dogs keeping everyone safe in the rolling hills and tree-lined pastures.
Current cheesemakers Gorby Just and Geoff Hartmann are also passionate about their craft, and they are cheese nerds who seek out every educational opportunity they can to help them in their mastery of cheesemaking. While we visited, they showed us some cheeses they had from the previous season: Fryingpan Halloumi (which we now have in stock from this season’s milk), Wonderland (an aged, raw-milk Tomme that is available in some stores around the Seattle metro area), and Devil’s Dream, an aged goat Tomme with peppercorns. They also served us a chevre cheesecake with Cajeta made on the farm, as well—and that was so dang good.
In the regular cheesemaking season which is now winding into place, the creamery also makes fresh Chèvre and a variety of small-format soft-ripened, bloomy-rind cheeses in beautiful little shapes: the tiny drums Glacier and Paradise, and the ash-ripened pyramid Summit. There’s also the Knapsack Feta which is a standby available most widely throughout the Seattle metro area. Later in the season they’ll make washed-rind Tipsoo, which is a cow-goat blend semi-soft cheese washed with hard cider from Rockridge Orchards.
Aside from the beauty of the location, the tastiness of the cheese, and the cuteness of the animals, our biggest takeaway from the visit was the shared ideals of our businesses. The team at Mountain Lodge is invested in making high-quality, hand-crafted cheeses that they like to eat themselves and which can feed their local community. They aren’t interested in making cheeses that are available everywhere, because they believe in the richness of offering a product that is not just a taste of the place where it comes from, but also a special delicacy found only in a given region. In pursuit of that, they are determined to make the best quality milk from a herd of incredibly well-cared-for and happy goats. Everything on the farm is in service of the goats, because without them there would be no amazing milk for cheese.
We are looking forward to supporting Mountain Lodge Farm after Washington Cheese Month ends and as the year draws on. We will be sure to order more varieties of their cheeses in the coming months, so stay tuned!
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Courtney Johnson and Tailor Kowis
Co-Owners, Street Cheese LLC
StreetCheeseSEA@gmail.com
www.StreetCheeseSEA.com
