Latest news from our Tuesday Tasters
This week, we selected some fine American cheeses for our Tuesday Tasting Team. We added a couple of condiments and some fine crackers to accompany the cheeses. Let’s see what they have to say!
When I tasted the first cheese this week, the Barely Buzzed from the Beehive Cheese Company, I was astonished. Here I had a cheese that was hand rubbed with espresso and lavender. That was certainly a new combination to me. But it works so very well. So well that coffee and lavender will be forever connected in my mind! I looked at the Beehive’s website and see that they recommend eating this cheese with chocolate! We don’t currently have any chocolate in the house but I can’t wait to try this!
I moved on – very greedily – to the next cheese and I fell in love all over again. Susan had described this as a stinky cheese – I didn’t find it stinky but I did find it delicious! This cheese, Grayson, is made in Virginia by the Meadow Creek Dairy. This cheese is made with milk from their own Jersey herd and has a limited availability – usually June until March so we’re already on a countdown. Before we started this wonderful experiment with Cheese Culture, being cheese-innocents we’d never really thought about cheese being seasonal. Now we know better!
Of the three American cheeses this week, it’s impossible to select a favorite. Oh, OK then, if someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I choose a favorite, I would say the Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tan. This is a wonderful creamy cheese and like Grayson has a limited availability. I’d urge you to buy some before I buy it all! We had all our cheeses with fresh fruit (apricots, pears, cherries and grapes this week) and also with some delicious bread from Gran Forno. Although we were having an American cheese week we tried all our cheeses with l’Abeille Occitane, a pure provençal flower honey. Until we started this foodie experiment, we’d never tried combinations of cheese and honey but it’s a voyage of discovery!
But there were two other highlights in the accompaniments department this week. The first was a box of some fantastic crackers – 34° Natural Crispbread. These were a perfect choice on Susan’s part because, although they are delicious on their own, they are also perfect with the cheeses we tried this week. Then, the real revelation came along – Harvest Song fresh walnut artisan preserve. This was a complete surprise to me. In fact, I’m not even going to try to describe how incredibly excellent these are. I’ll just suggest that you try it yourself. Cheese Culture has totally changed the way we look at – and eat – specialist tasty foods. Now, we’re looking forward to next week!
Join us again next time to see what our intrepid Cheese Culture Tasting team are trying out!
Cheese Culture
813 East Las Olas Boulevard.
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
Phone: 954-533-9178
