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Connecting Cheesemakers and Cheese Lovers Through The Cheese Course

by Susan Marquis

Picture this: You’re bringing the sheep in for the night, rounding up the last lamb that has wandered into the nettles, bringing them all into the pen for safety from the coyotes and the occasional cougar. As you look across the mountains and pasture, you see nothing. Well, maybe Canada. And your thought is, “I wonder which will follow the grilled stuff quail and duck sausage better—the goat or the sheep cheese?

What to Know About Queso

by Sarah Leech-Black

Mention “queso,” the Spanish word for cheese, and one might envision the gooey melting stuff of quesadillas or spicestudded hybrids like Pepper Jack. However, the range of dairy products to be found through Central and South America ranges from fresh cheeses to aged ones, as well as a wide variety of creams.

City Sights

by Meaghan Colleary

Editor’s Note: Meaghan comes to Cheese Enthusiast by way of New York City. Unable to raise cows or goats in Manhattan and limited in her cheesemaking facilities by her 800 square foot high-rise apartment, Meaghan pursues her love of all-thingscheese through cheese shops, restaurants and cheesemaker friends. Meaghan will be sharing her city view with us through an occasional column.

Cheesemaker Check-In

Who: Wanda Otero and Rosa Avalo

Where? We are neighbors and live in Manatí, Puerto Rico, in the northern coast of the island (5 minutes from beautiful beaches).

What’s your story?
Wanda: I am a microbiologist and own a Milk Quality Laboratory. In my lab we perform bacteriological tests to raw milk from dairy farms around the town, and the western half of the island. The name of the town is Hatillo, where there are more cows than people. There are almost 60,000 cows around my laboratory. I have a 21-year-old daughter (who still lives with us!!!) and a son who will be studying Veterinary courses in the U.S. next September.

Do Try This at Home

Knowing when to cut your curd is one of the great mysteries of cheesemaking. Cut it too early and you have a mushy curd and lose too much moisture and milk fat. Cut it too late and it is hard to get rid of the whey and to cut the curd into the right-size particles. Even with significant cheesemaking experience, knowing when to cut seems to require received wisdom from on high and even then, as described by Paul Kindstedt, “one person’s time to cut [is] another’s time to wait five minutes.”

Book Review

by Christopher Thompson

American Cheeses: The Best Regional Artisan, and Farmhouse Cheeses By Clark Wolf; Simon and Schuster, 2008. Hardcover. $25.

The sub-subtitle of Clark Wolf ’s handsome book is “Who Makes Them and Where to Find Them.” That covers the general structure of the book, which is divided into four regions of the U.S., and the bulk of its content, which comprises a selective compendium of cheesemakers, cheese mavens, and restauranteurs (with recipes) from each region, with a one-pagish overview for each. Each cheesemaker gets a short history (a couple of sentences), a comment and a preview of a few highlighted cheeses, followed by a list of the names of all their cheeses, and their address, telephone, and e-mail. A few mavens of the cheese world (Ricki Carroll, of New England Cheesemaking, for example) get a profile page.

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