People like to throw around superlatives when talking about the colossus of curd clout, that holey wheel so familiar, it has its own emoji—Emmentaler. It’s been called the world’s largest cheese, Switzerland’s most popular and one of the U.S.’s most imported. And according to Alfred Rufer, vice director of the Emmentaler Appellation d’Origine Protegée (AOP), it’s also the most copied.
They say the third time’s a charm, but in the case of Jasper Hill Farm’s Harbison, a spruce bark-wrapped, soft ripened, bloomy rind cheese, it took four tries to win the American Cheese Society’s coveted Best of Show award for 2018.
With more than two decades of operations, two creameries, four retail stores, dozens of honors and 2,000 tons of cheese, it’s safe to say Cowgirl Creamery, located in picturesque Point Reyes Station, CA, is a success. And to think, it all started thanks to a journey in a baby blue Chevy van.
You see, in 1975, friends Sue Conley and Peggy Smith graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, packed up the van, and drove cross country to the then-counter-culture cuisine epicenter—the Bay Area.
The cheese market is in flux: Milk prices have been increasing. Feed prices went up last year, so dairy farmers raised fewer cows. Yet, the United States has more cheese in storage than any year since record-keeping commenced in 1917. The United Kingdom is less than a year from leaving the European Union, and there...
I like to equate the rise of Sweet Cheddars to Breakfast Cereal. My grandmother was born in 1892, and her breakfast choice was oatmeal, although some new-fangled cereals were invented when she was a child. All were healthy and none had added sugar. Today, cereals have insane levels of sugar and breakfast has become the...