Saturday, June 4th is National Cheese Day, and as food and cheese lovers ourselves, we urge you to let your inner cheese lover loose, surrender to your cravings, and indulge! Pop in to your local Fairway and taste a few morsels from our breathtaking cheese counter featuring over 600 artisanal cheeses from all around the world, each with their own delicious taste, texture and aroma. Feeling adventurous? Try these picks from master cheesemonger, Steve Jenkins. He wouldn’t steer you wrong.
QUESO CLARA
A deeee-light. A mitzvah. Serendipity! Dumb luck to have fallen across it. A raw, firm, yet tender handmade RAW goat’s milk cheese, that’s rustic, primitive, and shouldn’t exist at all, but one of those cheeses you taste in Europe that makes you say to yourself ‘why can’t we have this cheese at our counters?’ Well, we do. And it’s Queso Clara, and it’s made by a young couple not far from Salamanca in Leon. It has that superb flavor that only comes from raw milk, a sensation on the palate that sends you off into a reverie of being a long way from the United States of Boring Cheeses. Serve it with all manner of accompaniment.
QUESO DE VARE
Queso de Vare is firm and toothsome, with a texture that starts out flinty but immediately melts on your palate into a liquid that provokes a desire to proclaim this the finest goat cheese. Serve it with all manner of accompaniment. It’s made in a tiny village called Vera that is linked to by a paved road by a dirt track within Spain’s Bay of Biscay-hugging province called Asturias, a region worthy of a lifetime of exploring if not permanent residence. Vare’s Vera’s pastures are mere miles from the sea, and you can smell it from there, and the grass and wild herbs these goats graze upon are imbued with this salty air, and it acts upon the soil and these nutritious plants, and the result is rich and remarkable milk that is transformed into this perfect cheese, one that is only made there by one devoted family.
QUEIJO DE SERPA
Here, for those of you seeking to have your minds blown by cheese, is SERPA, from the province of Serpa in Portugal’s Alentejo region, a wonderland for those of us who love rolling vistas of undisturbed farmland painted with wildflowers and thistles, the purple one of which is used for the rennet that coagulates the raw sheep’s milk of the area that goes into this amazing cheese, the most important PDO (protected domain of origin) cheese in the whole country. Serpas’s origins are so ancient they pre-date history. It remains a demonstrably handmade (artisanal) cheese, one so primitive and rustic; its mere existence is astounding. It is still made only at night; we are led to believe, as it was when we last visited the cheese maker. Serpa is more a confection than a cheese, delicate cloth-wrapped custard that coyly hides a powerful fragrance and enormous flavor. Serpa is made only at night because Alentejans have always believed that sunlight bewitches their sheep’s milk, and that consumption of a daylight-made Serpa cheese is asking for madness. The result is a lot of late nights lit by kerosene lanterns and Alentejan wines, which are marvelous. Serve this staggeringly delicious cheese with Esporao, Alentejo Reserva, João Portugal Ramos or any of a dozen other wines.
BRIE DE MEAUX BY ROBERT ROUZAIRE
This is the real deal as opposed to that most forgettable of cheeses referred to legally as “Brie”, but having no resemblance (other than visual) whatsoever to THIS, THE REAL DEAL. Brie is a region just east of Paris, once lovely, now hideous with urban Euro-sprawl. Real Brie has almost no presence in the refrigerators of most commercial food retailers, but at Fairway we have it! Our longtime friend and fellow master cheesemonger, Robert Rouzaire, persists in turning out one of the rarest wonders of the realm of gastronomy with this Brie that is the epitome of satisfaction and complexity – at once a riot of flavors on my palate – white truffle. Fresh farm eggs fried to an over-easy runniness and roasted garlic nubbins that reside within a roasting pan holding a well-roasted farm-fresh chicken. THAT’S what real Brie tastes like.
FIANCEE DES PYRENEES
Yes, these disks of sheep’s milk cheese are decidedly ‘affianced’, betrothed, the promise of and to the gorgeous Pyrenean pastures whence they come. Like the swooping, impossibly gorgeous pastures, they are primitive, timeless, rustic and abundant in all they represent – several thousand years of another marriage, a ‘ménage a six’ – soil, plants, sheep, air, sunlight and Pyrenean shepherds and cheese makers, each disk a powerhouse of complex flavor and near-custardy texture. Each should be served and consumed on one’s knees, hat doffed, accompaniments ordained for quality – crusty breads, charcuterie, seasonal fruits, olives and raw vegetables.
