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www.gourmetnews.com n JUNE 2019 GOURMET NEWS 6 8 Helping Your Customers Think 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 Pinter- est, 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 me- tered 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 fla- vor, 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 in- cluding "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 incorpo- rate specialty cheese into everyday meals. She's one of those who says she'd never rec- ommend that anyone go out and buy expen- sive cheese solely to cook with it, but she also says that it's common for people who enjoy making cheese plates when they're entertain- ing 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." She points out that the home cook who has a specialty cheese she loves at hand and a recipe that works with commodity cheese can simply start by substituting a bit of the specialty cheese into the recipe along with the less expensive cheese she's used before and tasting what happens. "More times than not, you're going to be happy with the re- sult," she said. 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 ham- burger or on a sandwich, but do that one bet- ter. 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 op- portunities for creativity, which is an urge that brings consumers to purchase specialty foods in general. The marriage of cheese and culi- nary 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 put- ting on their menus. "When you have food people in your life and around your table, cre- ative things happen," Gremmels said. "Unin- hibited 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 look- ing for. "The cheese offered the chef the magic he was looking for on a salad, on a burger, creating a compound butter," Grem- mels said. "I like to fold the chunks into a burger patty along with sauteed onions." Blue Heaven, which is a blue cheese pow- der, was created as a result of a similar sugges- tion 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 wonder- ful," he said. In the powdered form that Grem- mels now calls Blue Heaven, the cheese had a flavor that was subtly blue but carried a burst of umami and the characteristic Rogue Cream- ery 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 inter- esting 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 incorpo- rating 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 pre- mier 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 ac- knowledges 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 lit- tle wheel of The Cellars at Jasper Hill's Win- nimere 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. Genesee Candy Land Launches OINKS Brand An interview with Lorri Alden, Owner, Gene- see Candy Land. GN: Tell our readers about your company's signature product. LA: Genesee Candy Land is dedicated to crafting delightfully different delectables to surprise and delight customers every day. From handcrafting sweet treats in our retail store to becoming a specialty manufacturer famous for chocolate bacon products, we're attracting attention. In 2015, I created our signature chocolate- covered bacon, using a corporate marketing background, a fondness for cooking shows plus an entrepreneurial spirit. This led to a manufacturing facility producing innovative wholesale goods – not only chocolate-cov- ered bacon in two varieties but also four types of jumbo decadent cookies, fudge bites and our 'animal poo' line of chocolates avail- able online and in select convenience stores. GN: What are you doing this year that's dif- ferent from last year? LA: We unified our product line by launching OINKS, a distinctive brand for our chocolate- covered bacon products, including applewood- smoked and jalapeño strips. For bite-sized treats, Chocolate Bacon Bites come in a reseal- able pouch for grab-and-go snacking. Our newest product, Chocolate Bacon Truffles, features smoked bacon bits combined in a dark chocolate-covered shell for a twist on the clas- sic. We developed new packaging for bacon strips, bites and chocolate truffles. GN: What makes your company unique? LA: We're lucky to have a retail store, which features a chocolate shop in Golden, Colorado. It serves as a product labora- tory for the manufacturing business. I feel like I'm in the classroom daily, exploring ways to improve my craft. Everything I've done has prepared me for this – I love retail – plus getting daily cus- tomer feedback was the 'a-ha moment' in be- coming a manufacturer. In addition, Genesee Candy Land is the only food manufacturer in the United States to receive certification from the U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture to process bacon strips enrobed in chocolate. Obtaining this desig- nation was a rigorous process and it sets us apart. GN: Where is your current product empha- sis? LA: OINKS is an innovative, playful brand that blends sweet and savory tastes from foods already loved individually to create uniquely sweet treats. Our chocolate-dipped bacon products have been wildly successful; bringing our best sellers to- gether continues our evolu- tion as chocolatiers. Our broader vision is to con- tinue to disrupt the snacking category by blending loved foods to create new products. I want to dazzle a buyer when they're intro- duced to our products. I never want someone to roll their eyes and think 'I've seen this product four times already this week.' We strive to create deliciously different delec- tables with each and every product. GN: Is there a fun component to your unique product lines? LA: We get two reactions when people try our OINKS products for the first time: 'You did WHAT to bacon?!' Or, 'I love bacon and I love chocolate, so I'll love this.' It's fun to watch this reaction. We are testing other loved food items that can handle the 'zip' of bacon. For more information, go to www .geneseecandyland.com, call 303.526.3073 or email geneseecandyland@gmail.com.