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bellastraniera
a.k.a. Marcy Swingle - obsessed with food and fashion.View my photography website.
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Tag Archives: cheese
Hard Cider Revival
A sustainable-farming organization may seem an unlikely force behind a trendy new alcoholic beverage, but that’s exactly what’s happening with the Apple Project, an effort by the Glynwood Institute to help Hudson Valley apple growers stay in business by diversifying into hard cider.
Once one of the most popular beverages in America, hard cider fell prey to the Prohibition and urbanization, never quite regaining ground after the Prohibition was lifted. But the delicious new varieties being produced now will make you wonder why it ever fell out of favor. During Hard Cider Revival Week in New York, Americans and a few French cider producers have banded together to market cider with the same zeal normally reserved for Bud Light with Lime. (more…)
Brooklyn Larder
Whenever a magazine publishes a guide like “The Best Unsung Food Shops,” as Time Out NY did recently, it begs the question of what other gems have been left out of the collective New York food consciousness. Brooklyn Larder, on the border of Park Slope and Prospect Heights, is one of the few specialty food shops in New York that succeeds with flying colors in several categories and across several cultures.
The cheese counter is tightly edited and wonderfully curated, with several interesting cheeses available every day as samples. We picked up a wedge of Irish Gubbeen cow’s milk cheese (first sampled at a Joy of Cheese tasting) and a rare American sheep’s milk “Magic Mountain” cheese from Woodcock Farm, VT. (more…)
The Joy of Cheese at d.b.a. Brooklyn
Wine isn’t the only thing that pairs well with cheese: Beer is a great match too, especially if there’s plenty of it, as there was at the Joy of Cheese tasting at d.b.a. Brooklyn on a recent night. Cheese expert Martin Johnson and d.b.a. owner Ray Deter joined forces to present seven rounds of beer and cheese, with a special focus on holiday brews.
Standouts among the cheeses were two English selections, a Spenwood and a clothbound Montgomery cheddar, and the Gubbeen washed rind cheese from Ireland. (more…)
Murray’s Melts – A First Look
The humble bacon, egg and cheese sandwich may never be the same.
Can you ever go back to a deli sandwich with a too-big roll, meager egg, and supermarket quality bacon and cheese after one of Murray’s breakfast sandwiches? The answer is unclear, because Murray’s combination of farm egg, fontina cheese, gourmet bacon on a thin English muffin that perfectly frames the ingredients within is pretty redonk, even for someone who thinks they’ve sampled the best bacon, egg and cheese in the land.
Murray’s Melts
Stop the insanity – or actually, please don’t: Grub Street reports that Murray’s Cheese has just opened a sandwich counter, Murray’s Melts. Imagine the deliciousness of Murray’s taleggio, maple leaf smoked gouda, or double creme brie on Blue Ribbon Bakery bread, sandwiched next to sopressata, roasted turkey, or prosciutto, then topped with caramelized onions, sauerkraut, or cornichon then grilled to crunchy melt-in-your-mouth goodness. That and so much more now exists! There are 14 cheeses to choose from at this sandwich counter, nine meats, eight veggie toppings, and five fancy condiments. They even do breakfast sandwiches. Sandwich prices start at $3.99. (more…)
The Joy of Cheese: Good Cheese for Hard Times
Last night Marie Fromage and I went to another tasting for the Joy of Cheese at Ten Degrees – this time focused on inexpensive cheeses for the rest of us. The depressing packaged cheese section at Trader Joe’s notwithstanding, just because you’re on a budget doesn’t mean you have to forgo good cheese. Our host and fromagier extraordinaire Martin Johnson, who now also teaches at the 92nd Street Y, brought out a few of the best. “There are lots of great cheeses for $25 a pound or less,” he told the group of about 15 at the tasting. Plus, as he pointed out, cheese, bread, some sort of charcuterie and a salad can make a great summer dinner.
- Camembert Mons. This was one of our favorites – silky, slightly funky, vegetal and mushroomy. A pasteurized Camembert, yes, but it’s produced by acclaimed affineur Herve Mons. You can’t go wrong with cheeses by this guy. Available at Whole Foods Fromagerie (on the Bowery) and the Bedford Cheese Shop.
- Pecorino Rosellino. The Italians are known for thowing all sorts of things into their wine, and it turns out the same thing is true with Italian sheep’s milk cheese. In what was originally a controversial move, cheesemakers started rubbing classic Italian pecorino with tomatoes – doubly blasphemous because tomatoes actually originate from the New World. But the result is an excellent pecorino, with a softer, fruitier, more complex edge. Available at the Bedford Cheese Shop. (more…)
La Superior
One of the worst things about eating Mexican food in LA is coming back and eating it in New York. The New York version of Mexican food is almost sure to disappoint after you’ve had the vibrant, spicy food at a random hole-in-the-wall in an LA strip mall. Even the most successful NYC Mexican restaurants don’t source traditional ingredients like goat, and they get the cheese all wrong – Vermont cheddar is surely not a staple south of the border. Most Mexican food in New York is what Italian food was here in the mid-’80s: dumbed-down Mexican-American, not authentic Mexican.
That’s why it was such a relief to discover La Superior in Williamsburg after reading Pete Wells’ $25-and-under review. As soon as the first dishes landed, we knew: they got the cheese right.
La Superior’s requesón is a mild but cheesy cheese, fresh, with the consistency of a crumbly cottage cheese. Though it’s said you can use ricotta as a substitute, I don’t find the taste the same at all. (One close flavor you can sometimes find is Mexican Cotija cheese – not at high-end cheese stores, but at corner bodegas.) Here it is sprinkled on top of the flautas de pollo, which were very crisp and topped with bright, fresh greens and salsa that contrasted with the creaminess of the cheese.
Gorditas, typical Mexican street fare, are highly addictive little corn buns, split and stuffed with chorizo, lettuce, and more requesón. La Superior’s taste a little like huitlacoche, the surprisingly tasty weird corn fungus. If you want to spice up the gorditas some more, the green salsa served alongside does the trick.
The quesadillas also come street-style, more like heftier empanadas than a mere fried tortilla. But for me this amount of bread overwhelmed the filling.
Their tacos are amazing little delights, each one a separate burst of flavor. (This too is where so many other NYC Mexican places get it wrong – all Mexican dishes shouldn’t taste the same.) Clockwise from top, these are the camarón al chipotle (very spicy shrimp tacos), the carne asada (smoky grilled skirt steak), the carnitas (pork confit topped with sweet white onion), and the phenomenal rajas, roasted poblano pepper strips cooked with that fabulous cheese. This was a really intriguing combination. Usually you think of a creamy cheese as something to quell the spiciness of pepper, but when they’re cooked together, the cheese has the effect of drawing it out.
Alas, there may be a shortage of authentic Mexican food in New York, but if you can locate Cotija cheese, here’s a recipe for a Mexican salad for you. But if you’re going to La Superior, here’s your strategy:
- Arrive early (7-ish). If there’s a wait, you’ll have to wait in line – they don’t take cell phone numbers.
- BYOB! There’s a bodega around the corner with a good selection of beer.
- Prices are crazy cheap.
- Their idea of “decor” is a single string of colored lights. You’re not here for the romance.
- It’s much easier to get a table on busy nights as a party of two than as a larger party.
La Superior
295 Berry Street
Williamsburg
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-388-5988
Mexican Poblano and Tomato Salad
Mexican Cotija cheese isn’t for sale at New York’s fancy cheese emporiums, but you can find it in some corner bodegas. If your hunt for authentic cheese is successful, here’s a recipe for a Mexican salad for you. It ran many years ago – in the LA Times, of course.
Mexican Poblano and Tomato Salad
4 poblano chiles
2 tomatoes, diced
1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. dried Mexican oregano, crumbled
3 tbsp. chopped cilantro
3 tbsp. lime juice
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 head butter lettuce
1/4 cup crumbled Cotija cheese
wedges of lime dipped in chile powder, for garnish
Roast the chiles on a gas burner or grill until charred all over. Place them in a Ziplock bag and close. Let them stand until cool, then slough off the charred skin. Core and seed them, then cut lengthwise into thin strips.
Toss the chiles with tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, cilantro, lime juice, and salt. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes. Arrange butter lettuce on four salad plates, top with pepper mixture, and sprinkle with Cotija cheese. Serve with lime wedges.
Serves 4.
Variation: If you can find requesón cheese, try substituting it for Cotija. Combine a 1/2 cup of requesón with the chili mixture, and instead of letting it all sit, heat it gently on the stove for about 5 minutes, until warmed through. Serve on top of cool butter lettuce, garnish with limes. Think of it as a salad version of La Superior’s rajas.
The Joy of Cheese
Did you know that “artisanal” refers to a cheese that’s been made from the milk of a single herd? That it’s useless to walk into a cheese shop and just ask for “tomme,” because then you’re asking for “from the land of”? That there’s an underground American movement for unpasteurized milk?
Most people don’t know these things, but Martin Johnson, one of the city’s best and most experienced fromagers, does and is happy to teach you. When he’s not working for the Bedford Cheese Shop in Williamsburg or writing about basketball for the New York Sun, he’s conducting cheese tastings at 10 Degrees on St. Mark’s Place. For $30, he’ll take you and the rest of the group through about 12 excellent, hard-to-find cheeses of a certain type.
In March, it’s cheese that goes with martinis. The theme came from an inadvertent challenge from Max McCalman, who said to Johnson one night, “You can’t pair cheeses with vodka, can you?” Turns out you can. We tried a number of interesting, unusual hard cheeses, like Coolea, a gouda from County Cork, Ireland; Foja Di Noce, a Tuscan cheese that’s rubbed in hazelnuts as it ripens; and Ouray, a wonderfully sharp, crumbly cow’s milk cheese from Poughkeepsie. It’s an entertaining way to develop your palette: As the tasting progresses, Johnson throws in “mystery cheeses” related to the rest of the bunch, then asks you to guess what country it’s from and whether it’s cow, goat, or sheep’s milk. With the right crowd, the competition becomes amusingly cuttthroat.
To sign up for class, which is on Tuesday nights from 7 to 8:30, you need only email Martin Johnson at thejoyofcheese@yahoo.com. Schedules and themes – April is “All About Chevre,” May is “Viva Italia,” and June is “the Young Americans” – are posted on the Joy of Cheese blog and site.
Coolea, Niman Ranch salami, and a Bombay Sapphire martini
Ascutney Mount, Foja di Noce, and Tomette Chevre
Mystery cheese #1! (An aged goat gouda.)
Lavort, Doddington, Lessino
Mystery Cheese #2! (Some kind of Roquefort.)
Ouray, Mimolette, Stanser Schafkase
Picholine
Terrance Brennan is one of the few Superchefs who manages to be approachable without being, well, cheesy. If only more chefs (and fashion designers?) could be like him. His various spin-off brands make perfect sense. Huge stash of cheese in Artisanal’s cave? Line of cheeses dubbed “Artisanal.” Creator of innovative but simply constructed dishes? Microwaveable gourmet meals sold on Fresh Direct. And not once has he told his fans how to decorate a powder room.
His makeover of Picholine gave me a reason to travel to the wilds of the Upper West Side, to that faraway land just a few blocks north of the Time Warner Center. Since I hadn’t been to Picholine in any of its former incarnations, I brought a friend who is a regular at Picholine past and present. “They changed the sconces,” she said of the new decor. “That’s pretty much it.” The new paint that made some critics gasp “purple!” didn’t have the same effect on me. It’s a muted lavender, and it goes well with the beautiful chandeliers. Lavender could only be considered radical in a land north of 14th Street.
But there are some truly radical twists on the plate. The one we found most intriguing was the celebrated sea urchin panna cotta (photo from Grub Street, since I don’t take food photos at 3-star joints, sorry). It’s visually stunning, with contrasting black caviar, a perfect raised oval of orange-y sea urchin panna cotta, and the neutral color of the surrounding “chilled ocean consommé,” which did look like the bubbly tip of a wave running up the beach. “It tastes like the sea,” my chef friend sighed. The sea urchin panna cotta almost made me wish a new trend in aspic would result… would such a thing be possible, or even good? I’m willing to eat it, if more chefs are willing to experiment.
The warm Maine lobster appetizer didn’t win many points for originality, but it delivered on taste and decadence. Vanilla was a nice and subtle addition to a tried-and-true butter poaching formula. I went for a half portion of the squid ink linguini as an appetizer, because I’d read that was good. Though the sauce did have a nice paella-like quality as advertised on the menu, I experienced some order envy when surveying my dining companions’ choices. Mine just seemed boring by comparison.
Somehow we managed to locate a relatively inexpensive wine on Picholine’s expensive list. The excellent, complex 2005 Acacia Carneros Pinot Noir went for $66, though you can buy it for $24 at Sherry Lehmann if you want to try it at home.
When the entrees came round, my chef friend was enthralled by her wild mushroom and duck risotto. The rice itself was more al dente than the Café Gray version in my copycat chef recipe, but the risotto as a whole had a similar creaminess. Black truffle butter gave it an especially nice flavor that I can only categorize as bosca, which is the more evocative Italian word for “forest.” In Italy, woods, earth, leaves, the scent of mulch underfoot are all in one word.
Venison in parsnip “pain perdu” was also an excellent ode to the winter months. Deeply flavorful but not gamey, the venison came prettily sliced and spiraled out on a plate, dressed in a huckleberry jus, which seemed to be a creative twist on duck with cherry sauce – the two tastes complemented each other similarly. Again I went with what I read and ordered the skate choucroute garni. Surprisingly, skate makes a great “wrap,” which is good, because what else are you going to do with this fish? The sausage/sauerkraut wrap filler was nearly as good as Kurt Gutenbrunner’s at Blaue Gans. But I wouldn’t put this dish at the top of my own list of Picholine faves. It goes to show you: don’t listen to food critics. Including me. Had I just ordered whatever caught my eye, I may have ended up the Master Orderer of the night.
Then, the moment we’d been waiting for: the cheese. The dapper celebrity fromager Max McCalman came round with the cart and spent a generous amount of time explaining the cheeses. Without him and Brennan and their brainchild Artisanal, would New York be so obsessed with cheese now? I doubt it. We ordered a tasting of eight cheeses, and Mr. McCalman helpfully provided us with a cheese menu with our picks marked off, as well as pens to take our own notes. I wish more restaurants would do this, because I never remember the cheeses in the morning. The standout selections were an end-of-season sampling of Vacherin Mont D’Or, the sort of liquidy Swiss we tried at Gordon Ramsay, and an excellent cow’s milk cheese from County Cork, Ireland, called Ardrahan.
A flurry of sweets arrived at the end – little chocolate fudge squares sprinkled with a few flakes of sea salt, teensy little crunchy cannoli filled with almond butter cream. Throughout the meal, Picholine displayed a lot of generosity with these little touches – the garlic and fennel bread sticks that are expertly made in house, the sweets at the end, and the excellent service throughout. We rolled out of the new space and back into the wilds of the Upper West besotted with food and wine and very impressed with Picholine.
Picholine
35 West 64th Street, between Central Park West and Broadway
212-724-8585
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