Thinking Beyond the Cheese Plate
By Lorrie Baumann
Cheese plates have become a staple form of creative expression that’s shared in the course of home entertaining. For those who are less confident about their ability to put together a cheese display that will impress their guests, cheesemongers are happy to give advice, there are discussion groups on Reddit and cheese boards are all over Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.
But artisanal cheese, great as it is as the centerpiece of a cheese board, doesn’t have to be something that people enjoy only when they’re standing up to eat – great cheese is very capable of taking its place in the meal’s main course.
Price Is Indeed an Object
Nobody’s suggesting that anyone should spend big money on a high-dollar specialty cheese and then use it as the whole cheese component for a mac and cheese, but a metered portion of something better can elevate a dish beyond what can be achieved with mass-marketed shreds and slices. “Beyond a certain price point, you want to feature it, but Carmody is at a price point where you can use it to lend its flavor,” said Liam Callahan, who makes the cheese at Bellwether Farms. Callahan makes Carmody from the milk of Jersey cows, which makes it mild and creamy with a golden color and buttery flavor, and for his family table, he likes to cube it up and add it to a bean salad or pair it with a tomato soup made from very ripe tomatoes, and his kids like to put it in quesadillas. “Carmody doesn’t get super-oily like some aged cheeses do,” he said, “It melts nice, but it doesn’t break and get oily. A lot of aged cheeses don’t accomplish that.”
Bellwether Farms is known particularly for sheep milk cheeses, but those tend to be too expensive for people to want to cook with them – they’re better eaten as they come from the market, Callahan said, but Crescenza, a soft-ripened cheese made from Jersey cow milk, works well on a flatbread or a bruschetta along with some balsamic vinegar or maybe a tapenade, and it pairs well with fruit, too. “It picks up flavor and adds creaminess,” he said. “If you’re looking for a really soft-ripened cheese that you can spread on bread without having a rind left over, the Crescenza works great for that.”
Don’t Let Good Cheese Go to Waste
Laura Werlin, speaker and author of books including “The All American Cheese and Wine Book,” which won her a James Beard Award and “Grilled Cheese, Please!,” among other cookbooks, is an expert on ways to incorporate specialty cheese into everyday meals. She’s one of those who says she’d never recommend that anyone go out and buy expensive cheese solely to cook with it, but she also says that it’s common for people who enjoy making cheese plates when they’re entertaining to have bits and bobs of that cheese left over at the end of the party, and they may need ideas for what to do with those orts, which was an inspiration for her books. “There’s nothing worse than buying good cheeses and having them go to waste,” she said. “We’re afraid of our cheese. We love it, but we’re not entirely sure what to do with it.”
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She likes to suggest to fellow foodies who’d like to venture into cooking with cheese that they think beyond the mac and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches and experiment with cheeses in other recipes as well. One of her suggestions is to try adding a new cheese into a salad. “Everybody knows they can put feta into a salad,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s nothing wrong with trying queso fresco, another salty cheese that does the same thing.”
Brie is great on a crostini, to use for a crouton on salad, it melts really well on a snack cracker, and it pairs well with fresh fruit, she added. “It doesn’t have to be party food,” she said. “I want people to embrace cheese in every form. We use it on a hamburger or on a sandwich, but do that one better. Take the cheeses you like anyway and incorporate it into your food. Once you start thinking along those lines, it’s amazing what opens up.”
Use the Opportunity to Get Creative
Cooking with specialty cheese presents opportunities for creativity, which is an urge that brings consumers to purchase specialty foods in general. The marriage of cheese and culinary creativity is reflected in the way that the ideas for many of Rogue Creamery’s newer cheeses were born in conversations between Gremmels, who is Rogue Creamery‘s “Mr. Blue,” and the chefs who were interested in using his cheeses in the dishes they were putting on their menus. “When you have food people in your life and around your table, creative things happen,” Gremmels said. “Uninhibited sharing around food gave birth to Smokey Blue, Blue Heaven and TouVelle.”
Smokey Blue was the first smoked blue cheese on the market and has become one of Rogue Creamery’s top-selling cheeses, but the original idea behind it came from a chef who said that he’d be interested in a smoked blue cheese but wasn’t aware that such a thing existed. Gremmels hadn’t heard of one either, but he accepted the challenge and started experimenting. After a good deal of trial and error with various woods, he tried smoking Oregon Blue with hazelnut shells, and those produced the balance between spicy and sweet flavors that he’d been looking for. “The cheese offered the chef the magic he was looking for on a salad, on a burger, creating a compound butter,” Gremmels said. “I like to fold the chunks into a burger patty along with sauteed onions.”
Blue Heaven, which is a blue cheese powder, was created as a result of a similar suggestion that the same technology that produces dehydrated powdered milk could also be used to dehydrate a blue cheese, and there might be a culinary point to that. “I thought he was crazy,” Gremmels said, but he turned over a wheel of cheese for experiments. That 5-pound wheel came back to him as a snack bag full of powder. The size of that small bag surprised Gremmels, but so did the flavor of the powder inside it. “It was just so robust and so wonderful,” he said. In the powdered form that Gremmels now calls Blue Heaven, the cheese had a flavor that was subtly blue but carried a burst of umami and the characteristic Rogue Creamery sweetness, he added. Gremmels promptly sent little samples to molecular chefs around the country who’d been experimenting with foams and spheres and powders to capture the essential essence of food and flavor in interesting new formats to see what they’d do with this new powder. “It just sailed from there,” he said, and chefs began sprinkling it on steamed vegetables, stirring it into sauteed mushrooms, turning it into compound butters and incorporating it into spheres. Blue Heaven became so popular among chefs that it’s no longer their secret ingredient, and Rogue Creamery is now packaging it for retail sale alongside its premier handmade cheeses.
Cooking with Specialty Cheese Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Zoe Brickley of Jasper Hill Farms says that she hears a lot of questions from people who want to know what they should do with their specialty cheeses, and while she says that her first advice is usually, “Just bust out a spoon and a baguette and go nuts,” she also acknowledges that the advice that’s often given when people think about how to cook with wine also applies: “Your dish is only as good as the wine you use in it – and the same is true of cheese.”
Specialty cheeses tend to have complex aromas that elevate the experience of dishes to which they’re added, she said, and so she suggests that consumers who’ve bought a little wheel of The Cellars at Jasper Hill’s Winnimere for their Christmas cheese plate and have that last little bit of the gooey goodness left over afterwards think about using that to top a dish of roasted potatoes and bacon or carve a slice off their wedge of Bayley Hazen Blue at a summertime patio party and slap it onto a steak as it comes off the grill. “It’s a lot easier than making a pan sauce, and it’s just as impressive,” she said.
