Cheese Fondue with Cider

I tried a simple Google search for cheese and cider the other day. The top results of my search was a cheese fondue with cider.

I’ve made a few cheese fondues before. Most of them contain dry sherry and dry white wine with a lot of mild melting cheeses like Gruyère and Emmentaler along with a little bit of sharper flavorful cheeses like parmesan. The sherry, dry white wine, and parmesan give it a sharp flavor. So it makes sense to replace at least the dry white wine with a dry apple cider, and the parmesan with cheddar cheese.  Maybe even replace the sherry with apple brandy. Hmm.

Admittedly, over the years, I quit making fondue from scratch, as it can take awhile to get the right consistency. A local German restaurant called the Rheinlander has a fondue, whose recipe is apparently not a secret as it was on the local TV in 2004, which they bottle. I find it in the cheese section of the deli in a pint sized jar. I keep one in the back of my fridge for company, in which case I take out and put in a little dipping crock pot. Easy as that. I should try that fondue with a slightly sweet cider to cut though all the sharpness.

The fondue cookbook I have had for years had a simpler recipe, so I decided to give it a try. It called for 2 TBS of lemon juice, 2 cups of hard dry cider, 1 lb 9 oz of shredded cheddar cheese, and 2 TBS of corn starch. The lemon juice and cider are heated, and the cheddar is slowly added as it melts. Cheddar is not really a melting cheese, or rather, it melts, but a lot of oil separates out. Adding corn starch at the end did away with the separating and made the whole thing consistent.  It suggested using bread, apples, ham, and pineapple as dippers, all of which were very good. I tried sugar snap peas, but gave up on that. I served it with Red Barn semi-dry Jonagold Cider, but that was a bit of a mistake. Great cider, but the fondue ended up having a slightly sweet taste, and the semi-dry cider did not cut through to be refreshing, nor did it compliment the fondue as a sweet cider might have. Next time, I would go either for a dry cider, or a sweet cider.

Apple Cheesecake

While I do eat about an apple a day, my husband eats more apples than I do. He is also a teacher, which usually conjures up an image of a bright red apple. I think it was his idea to have an apple themed wedding. We served a keg of Spire Apple Cider instead of champagne, and our favors were applets.

I love cheesecake, and would rather have a cheesecake than a regular cake any day. When I found Portland Style Cheesecake, a company who can make wedding cakes out of cheesecakes, I was quite happy. My father-in-law was not, as he loves a good chocolate cake, but it was my wedding and I got to choose. Besides, my mother-in-law is gluten intolerant, so she can’t eat wheat, and therefore could not eat a cake, but she can eat cheesecake as long as the crust is gluten free.  We got him a Costco chocolate sheet cake to make him happy.

We went to PS Cheesecake to taste several types of cakes that they had, as they must have had a list of about 30 to choose from. We did not say to ourselves, “We really want an apple cake,” but when we tasted that one against a few others favorite flavors like black berry or peanut butter, it became clear that we really liked the apple cake. It had real apple chunks in it, too. Though, the blackberry was really good, but just not us.

From there, we saw that they had done a cake with pears on it, so we requested apples, which they got little artificial ones, as they were afraid of the heat and didn’t want the weight of real apples to slide off.

A lot of people loved the cake, as it was something different at a wedding, and most people would rate cheesecake above regular cake. Granted, it did cost more than a regular wedding cake would have.

History of Cheese

The history of cheese begins with the domestication of livestock, happening 9,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Near East. Cattle, sheep, and goats were kept for meat, wool, and other supplies, but when fed well enough, they would produce a surplus of milk beyond what their young could drink. Storing milk would have been difficult, as it would have soured in a few days. This souring process probably lead to the first yogurts (still very much a part of that region’s diet) and eventually cheese.

There are no written records about the invention of cheese, but popular speculation talks about how a nomad might have put milk into a container made out of a stomach, and that the rennet from the stomach curdled the milk. However, I believe this is half of the story. While the use of rennet was probably known, it was not regularly used until Roman times in the first century AD. My own thoughts is that an acid, such as lemon juice or grape juice turned vinegar, was splashed into warm milk, which caused it to curdle, much in the way the mascarpone and queso blanco DIY kits worked for making fresh cheeses. This technique would have been easier to perform and explain how cheese was made for so many centuries without rennet.

There is evidence, though, of dairy product consumption. Shane Sokol stated in And That’s How You Make Cheese!:

Ancient records mention how cheese and butter were made thought Egypt from about 4,000 BC onward. Cheese is mentioned many times in ancient texts, including the Bible where David carried ten cheeses to the army before slaying Goliath. In fact, the stadium of Jerusalem was build in the valley called Tyropaeon, meaning the valley of the cheese makers.

Barbara Ciletti writes in Making Great Cheese at Home, “According to archaeological finds, cheese was not only made, but molded and drained, as early as 2,700-2,800 BC. We know that certain terra-cotta urns were made with cheese in mine, because before firing they were perforated with tiny holes for draining.”

Being able to make cheese out of milk was very important in ancient life. Milk did not keep for more than a few days, and the livestock would only give milk after giving birth in the spring for a few months, so there was no milk later in the winter. Cheese allowed for long term storage and actually got better with age, and it was easier to transport than milk, all of which made cheese easier to trade than milk. Also, a small chunk of cheese had plenty of nutrition to sustain a person. Ciletti writes, “Roman soldiers carried great wedges of Parmesan and percorino, sturdy cheeses easy to cart around the countryside. These dryer, hard cheeses were less apt to spoil under the hot sun and staved off hunger during months of travel.”

Since Roman times, cheesemaking has spread and grown into a major industry. While I am skipping a lot of history between then and now, I must add two new modern techniques added that have changed cheesemaking. The first was  producing cheese in factories. Cheesemaking, as I talked about earlier, was originally done by those who had livestock with a surplus of milk, so it was very small scale and craft. Wikipedia states:

The first factory for the industrial production of cheese opened in Switzerland in 1815, but it was in the United States where large-scale production first found real success. Credit usually goes to Jesse Williams, a dairy farmer from Rome, New York, who in 1851 started making cheese in an assembly-line fashion using the milk from neighboring farms. Within decades hundreds of such dairy associations existed…. Factory-made cheese overtook traditional cheesemaking in the World War II era, and factories have been the source of most cheese in America and Europe ever since.

The second modern technique was Louis Paseur’s invention of the pasteurization process in 1850. Cheesemaking then turned away from using raw milk and allowed for large scale cheese making to begin, since the risk of losing a batch due to bacteria was greatly reduced. However, today there is an attempt at returning to raw milk cheeses as they taste better.

Sources and other readings:

• “A Brief History of Cheese.”
• Ciletti, Barbara. Making Great Cheese at Home: 30 Simple Recipes from Cheddar to Chevre. 2001
• “Domestic sheep.” Wikipedia.
• “Goat.” Wikipedia.
• “History of Cheese.” Wikipedia.
• “History of Cheese.” Kidipede.
• Hirst, K. Kris. “Cattle (BOS spp): History of the Domestication of Cattle”
• Ridgeway, Judy with updates by Hill, Sara. The Cheese Companion: a Connoisseur’s Guide. Second Edition, 2004.
• Sokol, Shane. And That’s How You Make Cheese! 2001.
• Stradley, Linda. “Cheesecake History.”
• Werlin, Laura. “About American Cheese – A Brief History”

Book Reviews: Books on Wine, Beer, and Cheese Pairings

Further readings on pairing wine, beer, and cheese:

All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes by Laura Werlin. 2003
Werlin wrote The New American Cheese: Profiles of American’s Great Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking with Cheese. Her All American Cheese and Wine Book is basically the same book but with more on wine added. Werlin did extensive research on both topics, and this is a dense book with advice and recipes. After an introduction, Werlin starts talking about cheese and how it is made, how to taste cheese extensively, seven different basic styles of cheese, how to look for and buy cheese by style, and how to serve a cheese course. Next, for wines, she talks about grapes, making wine, tasting wine, types of wine, and serving wine. I’m very impressed with both sections on how much time she takes talking about the actual tastings of both cheese and wine. She then presents the ten basic guidelines of pairing cheese and wine, talks about clues for perfect pairs by cheese style, and gives a chart of cheese and wine pairings at a glance. The core of the book is cheese dish recipes by course with wine pairing, followed by a description and profile of either winery or a cheesemaker. The Appendix alone contains 60 pages, talking about cheese terms, wine terms, cheesemakers around the country, wine makers around the country, resources (information and organizations), and a bibliography.

An Appetite for Ale: Hundreds of Delicious Ways to Enjoy Beer with Food by Fiona Beckett and Will Beckett
A cookbook that either uses beer in the recipes, or has a “best beer match” to go with the recipe. It does talk about pairing, and a lot of the food seems down to earth pub fare. The chapter on cheese is weak, but does have a good page on pairings before offering only a cheese and beer fondue and a gorgonzola and pear bruschetta recipes.

The Beerbistro Cookbook by Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin
A cookbook using beer, it has three decent pages on pairing beer and cheese, along with a large table on suggested processes for pairing the two. It has lots of recipes, including fondues, and a chapter on making ice cream with beer.

The Best of American Beer and Food: Pairing and Cooking with Craft Beer by Lucy Saunders
This book is a little bit of everything – a reader and a cook book. The first chapter is on pairing cheese and beer, and talks in great lengths about cheesemaking, planning a cheese and beer tasting, and some suggested pairings. The rest of the book goes on to talk about other pairings with beer, regional beers and their pairing trends, and lots of recipes including cheese-stuffed jumbo shrimp with bacon, using a saison-style ale.

The Cheese Companion: A Connoisseur’s Guide, by Judy Ridgway and updated by Sara Hill
This is a cheese identification book that talks only very briefly about pairing cheese with wine. However, for each cheese variety listed, it provides a recommended wine pairing. For example, it suggests pairing Chèvre to with a Sauvignon Blanc wine.

Cheese and Wine: A Guide to Selecting, Pairing, and Enjoying by Janet Fletcher. 2007
This book goes though and briefly suggests strategies for pairing wine and cheese based on texture, intensity, acidity, sweetness, mold, and region. It then tells you how to plan a cheese course, and then how to handle and store cheese. The heart of the book is pages talking about a specific cheese style, including milk type, region, and a lengthy description. At the very end is a sentence or two about what wines would work with that cheese, so this book is about eating cheese, and the wines to enhance that experience. The appendix has two pages showing a table of wines with what cheeses to pair them to, so it is kind of a quick summary. However, there is no index to allow for the quick look up of a particular kind of cheese or wine.

He Said Beer, She Said Wine by Same Calagione and Marnie Old. 2009
This beer vs wine food pairing book does talk about how to choose wine and beer to go with cheese. Honestly, the cheeses they picked for their battles would make a very good cheese platter in my opinion, and are easy to acquire.
Mozzarella: light-bodied sparkling wine, unwooded chardonnay, Belgian White Beer, or Hefeweizen
Goat cheese: Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Nior Rosé, slightly sweet hefeweizen, or a pilsner.
Brie: Pinot Gris, French Champagne, kriek limbic, or Berliner Weisse
Sharp aged cheddar: fortified Madeira, Cabernet Sauvignon, IPA, or English Brown Ale.
Parmigiano Reggiano: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chianti, amber, or IPA.
Roquefort: Amarone, Sautenes, British Strong Ale, or Russian Imperial Stout

Laura Werlin’s Cheese Essentials: An Insider’s Guide to Buying and Serving Cheese {with 50 Recipes} by Laura Werlin. 2007
In each cheese style chapter in this book there is a small section on which kinds of wines to serve with that style and how easy it is to pair with that style. Fresh cheeses are difficult to pair, going with light white wines. Semi-soft cheese paired with fruity unoaked white wines a light red, or a light beer such as a lager. Soft-ripened cheeses, with the rinds removed, go well with sparkling wines, unoaked Chardonnay, or an earthy Pinot Nior. Surface-ripened cheeses are paired with white wines or low tannin red wines. Next, for the easiest pairing semi-hard cheeses, serve them with just about any wine. For hard cheeses, look for white wines or low tannin red wines, or even a sherry. Blue cheeses are paired with port, sweet white wines, and sparkling dry white wines.  Last of all, for washed-rind cheese, Werlin pairs them with floral white wines, lighter fruitier red wines, and sweet wines. Otherwise, see Werlin’s other book, All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes for more in-depth coverage of this topic.

Matching Food and Wine: Classic and Not So Classic Combinations by Michel Roux Jr.
A cook book which briefly talks about wines and suggests three wines to pair with that recipe. I mention this book because it has a few recipes with cheese, which he then recommends wines with.

Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. 2009
Another dense book about understanding cheese, how to become a connoisseur, and talking about great artisan cheeses of the world. This book contains a chapter each on pairing cheese with wine and beer. After talking about wine in general, the book talks about complexity, sensory profiling, balance and harmony, and the finish. They offer good advice on serving the pairings, such as paying attention to serving temperatures, smell, taste, waiting for the finish, refresh your palate with water and bread, follow an order, and reflect on the pairings. They then offer suggested tasting plates of a few cheeses paired with flights of wines, along with a recommended method of scoring the pairs. Next, they talk about some general cheese-friendly wines, and what it takes to be cheese friendly. The beer chapter, although smaller, follows along the same lines, starting with talking about beer, pairing principles and guidelines, cheese friendly brews, and a suggested testing of six cheeses and three beers.

The New American Cheese: Profiles of America’s Greatest Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking with Cheese by Laura Werlin. 2000
More of an all around cheese book, it does have a small section on pairing cheese and wine, with an afterthought of pairing cheese with other beverages. Werlin expanded on this section with her later books.

The Cheese Plate by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. 2002
And older McCalman and Gibbons book dedicated strictly to consuming cheese, it dedicates chapter 6 to pairing cheese with food, including beverages. Again, it talks about cheese-friendly wines and wine driven plates. It briefly mentions, “Apple cider – not just the hard kind – as well as grape and berry juices are good [cheese pairing] possibilities. Coffee pairs well with many cheeses. But tea does not. Also, avoid orange and other citrus juices. In fact, I’m quite wary of even the lemon or lime wedge that goes with your sparkling water; it could easily interfere with a good cheese.” Their newer book expanded to talk about beer, which is not in this book.

Webites:

• The Wisconsin Milk Marking Board has a nifty website showing what cheeses go well with what wine, food, spirits, and beers.
• Cheese Cupid has an interactive website, where you pick your cheese, and it gives suggested beverages, or you pick your beverage and it suggests cheeses. It includes beer, cider in general, and some spirits.

Cheese and Beer

To begin the chapter on cheese, the book The Beer Bistro Cookbook by Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin states:

Forget all that talk you’ve heard about wine and cheese. The real partner for everything from cheddar to stilton is beer. But don’t take our word for it – as a sommelier! Any honest wine professional will admit that the motto in the grape trade is “taste with bread, sell with cheese,” primarily because the fats in cheese will help blot out the tannins and other harsh notes that may show up in youthful or aggressive wines.

Beer and cheese, on the other hand, well, that’s just a match made in gastronomic heaven. The trick, as ever, is simply picking the right style of beer for each particular kind of cheese.

The reason pairing beer with cheese is easier than pairing wine with cheese, according to Tim Smith in Making Artisan Cheese: 50 Fine Cheeses that you can Making in Your Own Kitchen, is that the carbonation of beer helps to cleans the palate.

Probably the best book I saw on this topic was Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. It had an entire chapter devoted to pairing beer and cheese, talking about ingredients, mouth feel and weight, and much more, and conclude with a pairing of three beers with six cheeses. McCalman and Gibbons state the following:

The general principles of pairing beers with cheeses are pretty much the same as the wine-and-cheese guidelines. You’re looking for balance, where neither partner overwhelms the other, and you want to consider both complement and contrast. Once you’ve sussed out a beer’s profile, you can start to look for similar, overlapping, or contrasting flavors, textures, and aromas in cheese… there will be surprises – matchups that should work but don’t and vice versa… I’ve found that wines tend to rely more on finding complements to their flavor components (i.e., harmony), whereas beers seem to be looking more for balance – it is more of a seesaw effect. The beer pairing balance is more about bitterness, in that bitter (hoppy) beers tend to go well with more sour cheeses and vice versa… Cheddars, which have good acidity, are classic partners for various types of beers, from English ales to Belgian wit styles. Salt content is also of prime importance when consider cheese-and-beer pairings. Oftentimes, when you pair a cheese with beers its salt can come to dominate, even with types you don’t think of as very salty. What’s happening is the other flavor components in the two partners are balancing each other out, leaving the cheese’s salt to come too far to the fore. In a beer-and-cheese lineup, as with a tasting of wine pairings, you’ll want to proceed from the lighter, milder lager, pilsner, and pale ale styles to the deeper, richer, heavier, darker, more complex-flavored styles of the brew.

They make the following recommendations:

• Traditional beers of one country pair well with the cheeses of that same country.
• Bigger cheeses such as aged farmhouse-style Goudas can be good partners, but you need a big beer to stand up to them. The full long-lasting flavors of hard Alpine cheeses can work well with bigger beers.
• Washed-rind cheeses often make excellent beer partners as long as the later are big and bold enough. A hoppy ale is a good choice; delicate, subtler-tasting brews likely won’t stand up.
• Another strong pairing is triple-crème cheeses with stouts. Knowing as we do that Champagne and triple crèmes work well together, this might be a bit of a surprise. When you’ve got a rich, buttery cheese in your mouth, a big dark beer that is also dry, bitter, and roasty is a nice complement, forming a “desserty” combo, like ice cream and chocolate cake.
• Some mellow middle-of-the road cow cheeses pair well with more acidic beers such as the Beliner Weisse style, which can be quite delicate and contain a good amount of lactic acid.
• Blue cheeses pair well with stouts and barleywines, which have the heft and inherent sweetness to provide balance.
• Generally speaking, sweeter blue cheeses go better with more bitter beers while more bitter blue cheese go with sweeter beers.

Smith gives the suggested pairings, including:

• Fresh cheese pair well with mellow beers, such as American wheat beers, American lagers, and German lagers.
• Soft-ripened cow’s-milk cheeses, such as Neufchâtel, Brie, and Camembert, are excellent companions for pilsners, porters, and pale ales.
• Washed-rind cheeses, such as Muenster, are complements to English brown, amber, and Belgian pale ales.
• Semi-hard cheeses, such as Cheddar, Edam, and Gouda, as well as the cooked-curd cheeses, such as Emmentaler and Gruyère, go well with pilsners, IPAs, double bocks, and Belgian ales.
• Parmesans and Romanos need a heavier beer as a partner: try a strong ale, stout, or porter.
• Because of their intense flavor, blue-vein cheeses require a beer that can hold its own. Try stronger porters, stouts, and heavier dark beers, such as barely wine.
• Goat cheeses are usually a bit more flavorful, so consider pairing them with IPAs, ESBs, brown ales, and porters.
• Pasta filata, particularly Provolone, are well matched with Bavarian whites and heavier Bavarian wheat beers (doppelweizen).

One other thing to note is that I kept coming across the “ploughman’s lunch,” which is an inexpensive British meal sent with the plough man to serve as his lunch, but can be found at pubs today. It consists mainly of bread, cheese, relish, and maybe other additions such as cold meats, apples, hard boiled egg, or other items. This meal is always washed down with beer, tying it to the cheese and beer pairings.

Further Readings:

• Artisanal Premium Cheese, “Beer and Cheese Pairing Tips”

Cheese and Wine

There are several different schools of thought about how to pair up wine and cheese. Judy Ridgway states in The Cheese Companion: a Connoisseur’s Guide, “Cheese seems to have a particular affinity with wine, and the two tastes can really complement each other. There are two schools of thought here; those who suggest that you should simply drink your favorite wine with your cheese and enjoy it, and those who believe that some wine and cheese combinations really do not work and that you should plan the match with care. In practice, the former view is more likely to dominate, but if you have the time you really can add to your enjoyment of cheese by finding the best partnership.”

When it comes to purposely selecting pairs, there are three main methods, as Ricki Carroll described in Home Cheese Making. They include:

1. Serve complementary flavors (a big sturdy cheese with a full-bodied wine).
2. Select contracting flavors, such as champagne and triple-crème cheese, to provide interest and balance.
3. Choose products from the same region. For example, serve a California dry Jack cheese with a spicy California Zinfandel.

In Making Artisan Cheese: 50 Fine Cheeses that You Can Making in Your Own Kitchen, Tim Smith suggests keeping this in mind when pairing:

• “In general, white wines pair better with cheese than red wines. (However, do not keep from experimenting!)”
• “Together, wine and cheese need to counterbalance or foiling (via acidity and tannin), or they require a matched texture and flavor profile. Rich wines should be paired with rich creamy cheeses, and sharp wines with sharper cheeses.”
• “The salt in the cheese exaggerates the taste of alcohol in the wine, making them seem ‘hotter.’ A salty taste in cheese is best counterbalanced by a hint of sweetness in the wine…”
• “Stronger-flavored cheeses (such as mature, washed-rind cheeses) are the most difficult to match and do not go well with strong, ample-bodied wines (especially reds). Pungent cheeses are best complemented by sweet wines. Oaky wines clash and overwhelm most cheeses, unless oak flavors are inherently associated with them.”
• “You aren’t compromising aesthetics by switching back to dry white wine for your cheese course. If your cheese course follows a dish accompanied by red wine, and is being served before (or instead of) dessert, the two styles of wine can coexist.”
• “When in doubt, go native. Local cheese and wines tend to work well together, and can be paired confidently.”
• “When planning a cheese course, choose either the cheese or the wine first, or pick an array of both that offers a range of possibility for all palates.”
• “The use of herbs, spices, and crusts in or on the cheese, as they may influence the effect of the wine. Also, don’t overlook the potential for incorporating cheese into salads and other light dishes for the complementary flavors offered.”

Some recommended pairings:

• Brie and Camembert: white wines with texture, like Chardonnay or Pinot Gris. Red wines with medium body and moderate tannin, such as Syrah and Merlot. Sparkling wines do well.
• Cheddar: Red wines such as Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Bordeaux.
• Feta: white wines like Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio, or a dry rosés
• Goat’s Milk Cheeses: Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Syrah , Merlot,
• Gorgonzola: Sparkling wines or sweet wines including a late-harvest Riesling
• Gouda: Chardonnay, Riesling, or a light Zinfandel
• Gruyère: Burgundy, Chardonnay, or Pinot Gris. A Pinot Noir can work sometimes.
• Mozzerella: a light zippy wine such as a Pinot Grigio or a dry rosé
• Parmigiano-Reggiano: Sparkling wine before the meal, and a full-bodied red during the meal, such as a Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Zinfandel.
• Swiss: Gewürztraminer or Riesling

As far as the order in which to serve the cheese and wines, Carroll interviewed Steve Jones of Provvista Specialty Foods in Portland, Oregon, who said, “Usually, I move from lighter to heavier fare; that seems the most natural. For instance, start with a sparkling wine and fresh chèvre. Move through an Alsatian wine served with a true Muenster or Chardonnay (my least favorite wine to pair with cheese) with a rustic sheep’s-milk cheese. Then move to a heavier red with an aged hard cheese, and finish with port or sherry served with blue cheese.”

In Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager, Max McCalman and David Gibbons get a little more specific about serving the two together. In summary:

• Pay Attention to Serving Temperatures: Serve cheese at room temperature, red wines slightly chilled, and white wines slightly warmer than chilled.
• Smell the wine and cheese separately
• Taste: Taste the wine first, clear your palate, and then the cheese. Then taste both together, allowing them to commingle.
• Wait for the finish: do not rush the tastings of the wine, cheese, or the wine and cheese together.
• Refresh your palate: have some water and bread
• Follow the suggested order for the pairings, but don’t hesitate to go back and do them out of order
• Reflect

Other Readings:

• Laura Werlin – Cheese & Wine Pairings and Host a Cheese & Wine Party.
• Artisanal Cheese Clock
• Artisanal Cheese – Cheese & Wine 101 and Champagne and Cheese Pairing

Pairing Cheese and Alcohol

First off, my instructor for “Le Nez du Vin”: The Nose of Wine gave a cautionary piece of advice when pairing cheese and wine, which I think would apply to all cheese and alcohol pairings. He said that when you are trying to taste and evaluate wine, serving cheese is a bad idea because it has oil that coats the mouth and affects how you taste. However, if you are just drinking a wine, cheese is an excellent accompaniment.

That said, I came across this little bit on page 155 in the Artisan Cheese of the Pacific Northwest by Tami Parr, and I felt like I had to share it.

For the uninitiated, pairing cheese and spirits can seem completed; novices often fear that they won’t do it right. In fact, pairing beverages and cheeses is really as simple as being present to the flavors your mouth is experiencing.

Start out with this principle: a good pairing is one where the flavors of both the beverage and the cheese are enhanced by the combination. In the best pairings, you may find that the pairing produces a remarkable transformation on your palate, and a third flavor revelation emerges. Bad pairings are easy to discern and will almost certainly cause your mouth to screw up involuntarily in an odd contortions as a result of the bitter, awkward flavors generated in your mouth. In fact, bad pairings are one easy way to start educating yourself about the ins and outs of pairing cheese and wine. Try a few pairings of wine and cheese, even random ones, and start paying attention to how combinations fit into broad categories.

Wine is the classic beverage for pairing with cheese, but that’s only the beginning. Some find that beer pairs well, if not better, than wine. Other beverages such as sake, cider, and limbic ales can also be nicely paired with cheese. More recently, people are beginning to experiment with pairing coffee and cheese, as well as whiskey and cheese.

Following are a few basic pairing principles to start you on your pairing adventures:

Trust Your Own Palate

Pairings are very subjective, and despite what anyone tells you, there are no right or wrong answers – really…

Pair Like with Like

Pay attention to the relative intensity of flavors you are pairing. Generally speaking, very strong flavored cheeses paired with light, dry libations won’t work because the cheese will overpower the wine. By the same token, a big red wine… will drown out a subtly flavored soft-ripened goat cheese. Pairing this way does neither produce a favor. That being said, see the next rule.

Be Open to the Unexpected

Whatever rules you might have learned may prove false with any given pairing at any given time. Cheese flavors vary throughout the year due to the diet of the animals and seasonal variations in butterfat content of milk; wines and beers also vary by vintage and by batch. In addition, counterintuitive pairs often work very well. For example, ports typically pair well with strongly flavored blue cheeses. You just never know.

The Wisconsin Milk Marking Board does have a nifty website showing what cheeses go well with what wine, food, spirits, and beers.

Making Wine with Whey

Shallon Winery in Astoria, OR makes a cranberry whey wine that is really good. I had written before that he “touts the health benefits of adding whey to the wine… This wine is not milky colored at all, and it is another bottle we take home. He recommends adding a little bit of 7-up to it for the bubbles, which is also excellent. I’ve never eaten it with turkey, which I imagine it would be good with, but to do so would probably mean I would have to share, and I would rather horde his wines.”

This wine has been the inspiration of trying to make my own whey wine, and I have been researching and experimenting.

First off, milk sugars called lactose are not fermentable by traditional yeasts, but instead require microorganisms such as Kluveromyces lactis or Kluveromyces fragilis to convert lactose to alcohol. Therefore, powdered lactose is actually used as a sweetener in beer and wine, as the yeast will leave it alone, leaving a sweet product in the end. Lactose is not usually captured in cheese, but is left in whey. I should note, though, that it takes a lot of lactose to make it sweet.

My original theory was that a wine maker would start a batch of wine fermenting, and then add the whey later. My reasoning behind this is that the alcohol would hopefully prevent the whey from spoiling. I should admit that from my own farming days, we would keep milk for the baby calves at room temperature for a few days before it would finally start to spoil around day three. In fact, before refrigeration, people would have left it sitting out. So I know that this is possible, but I was afraid it would spoil before anything would happen. Also, would the government allow a wine maker to leave whey out at room temperature for that long? My theory was that if the whey was added in the secondary, it would possibly preserve the whey so it doesn’t spoil. Another theory I had running against it was that adding acid to milk makes it curdle, and even whey curdles with acid at higher temperatures, so what would adding whey to high acid wine do to it? So many theories running though my head…

It turns out that in 1977, the Department of Food Science and Technology at the Oregon State University conducted an experiment using cheese whey to make wine. The results were published in a paper titled Utilization of Cheese Whey for Wine Production. It takes about 10 pounds of milk (1.15 gallons) to yield one pound of cheese, which means that 9 pounds is waste, or a whey by-product. The most common method used to make this whey waste profitable is to dehydrate it into powdered whey to use as a food supplement. However, the 1970s saw an energy crisis, so dehydrating whey was expensive, and they were looking for other cheaper usable methods to use whey and realized whey wine might be the answer.

So, armed with a research paper that is most definitely not a how-to, I kept some whey from three of my cheese batches, mixed it with some cranberry juice, added potassium metasulfite to get sulfur dioxide released, and some yeast. It started fermenting. Let the whey wine making experiment commence!

Book Review: Six Cheesemaking Books

Wanting to expand from DIY cheesemaking kits, I checked out from the library some cheesemaking books.

The Home Creamery by Kathy Farrell-Kingsley
This book tells you how to make fresh dairy products, such as butter, yogurt, sour cream, buttermilk, and nine fresh cheeses. It has a short introduction, and then you are making stuff. I find it a bit odd in places, as one recipe for buttermilk is to add buttermilk to skim milk. Also, I didn’t trust the feta recipe because it did not make brine or age it at all. It does have 109 pages dedicated to cooking with your freshly made dairy products, along with a small glossary and a list of sources for cheese making supplies, classes, and useful links. The book has only a few drawings, and it was the other dairy products and recipes included that held my interest with this book.

And That’s How You Make Cheese! by Shane Sokol
It is a small book with black and white photos. It gives a short history of cheese before going over ingredients, supplies and equipment, basic steps, how to start a cheese culture, and then finally cheese making recipes: 23 soft, hard, and mold and bacteria ripened cheeses. The back of the book contains a few sources for cheesemaking supplies.

Making Great Cheese At Home by Barbara Ciletti
A book very similar to And That’s How You Make Cheese! It starts off with an expanded history before going into the basic process of cheesemaking, supplies needed, and starter cultures with troubleshooting advice. It includes diagrams on cheese presses before launching into the cheese making recipes, broken down by fresh, soft and semisoft cheeses, mold- and age-ripened cheeses, and age-ripened hard cheeses. It contains 30 cheese making recipes, 18 cheese dish recipes, and numerous color pictures. However, the end of the book is just a glossary. I prefer this book over And That’s How You Make Cheese!

Making Artisan Cheese: 50 Fine Cheeses that You Can Make in Your Own Kitchen by Tim Smith
This book probably has the best organization for new cheesemakers. It goes through the history of cheese and then cheese making basics including milk types and composition, and other supplies. The thing about this book is that when it gets to making the cheeses, it is broken down into basic cheese making, intermediate cheese making, and advanced cheese making. Smith talks about how to drain the curds by hanging the cheesecloth for basic cheesemaking, but then builds on that in the intermediate cheese making by talking about with molds and presses. So instead off bombarding you with information all at once, he starts off easy and builds on the information by difficulty. This book has pictures of equipment and the finished cheeses, but illustrations of the techniques used.  It does contain resources in the index, including legality by state of buying raw milk.

Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll
An excellent cheese making book with 75 cheese making recipes. Skipping history of making cheese, it provides much more information on other topics, like the composition of different types of milk. It runs through different rennet, what chlorinated water does to rennet, how to make a starter cultures and troubleshooting, other ingredients needed, different types of equipment, how to make a cheese press, a homemade cheese record form, and a 15 step picture diagram of the cheesemaking process followed by a written description.  The cheese making recipes are then presented: soft, hard, Italian, Whey, Bacteria- and mold-ripened cheese, goat’s milk cheese, other dairy products. This last category covers everything found in The Home Creamery, plus a few extra like Devonshire clotted cream, though it only gives one recipe per item. The last part of the book is titled, “For the love of cheese – serving, enjoying, and cooking with cheese,” which is includes 40 pages of cooking recipes. In its appendixes there is a glossary of terms, a trouble shooting guide, resources, and other recommended cheese and cheesemaking books. One downside to this book is that has drawings instead of pictures, but it does have some personal stories from cheesemakers around the country. This is definitely the book I am going to buy when it comes to cheesemaking.

200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes by Debra Amrein-Boyes
This book begins with a short description of the different styles of cheeses there are, and then walks though, with drawings, the basic cheese making steps and techniques.  It, too, talks about different kinds of milk and their natural chemical makeup before talking about other the different cultures required, equipment, and how to store the cheese. It then has different cheese style chapters with a table of contents at the beginning, a few recipes thrown in, and style troubleshooting pages at the end. After it covers cheeses, there are also chapters on yogurt and kefir and then butter, buttermilk, and crème fraîche, though most of it is for flavored butters. This book has a glossary and some sources for supplies in many countries.  It has a few colored pictures in the middle of the book, but not enough to cover all the cheese or any recipes. I do like how it tells you how big of a yield to expect from each batch. I think I will eventually purchase this book, that is, if I want a cheese not found in Home Cheese Making.

Cheesemaking – Beyond Kits

Admittedly, my skills making cheese has not really expanded my further than the DYI kits. I’m still making mostly fresh cheeses, though I have tried to expand into a slightly aged cheese.

As a child, we had for a short amount of time a Mexican worker. His wife would come and get raw cows milk from us and make queso, which I loved. Don’t get me wrong – the DYI queso blanco recipe is good, but it isn’t how I remembered our worker’s wife made it. Hunting online, I found this recipe, and I went and got some  rennet, buttermilk, milk, and rennet to make it. Since I was already working with pasteurized milk, I just started making the cheese. The nice thing about it was that I didn’t need to heat it quite so much. However, it does require a second heating without stirring, which caused a bit of problems because I got different temperature readings from different locations in the pot. In the end, I got it to hot, but it still turned out tasting better than the DYI kit.

The other cheese I have attempted to make was a cow’s milk feta. I found some recipes online and tried twice, but they both failed to curdle. My local Clark County Goat Association had former commercial cheese maker Mary Rosenblum come give a demonstration on making feta and then ricotta from the left over whey. I learned a lot from her that day, and I went home and had my first success at making feta. Rosenblum also gives demonstrations at Kookoolan Farms in Yamhill, OR, and my regions Whole Foods Markets and Homebrew Exchange frequently give cheese making demonstrations. Look for classes in the Food Day section of the newspapers to find other classes. I highly recommend attending a cheese making class when moving beyond kits when making cheese.