Finally, a cheese from Texas! Something that has eluded me and Colleen in the three years since we launched this blog. Thanks again to the magic of mail-order cheese, I was able to procure Grassias, a mixed-milk cheese from Dallas’ Mozzarella Company.

Before you accuse me of butchering the Spanish language and spelling the cheese’s name wrong, please note that it is correct. Inspired by its lemongrass wrapping, the name Grassias came from a Facebook contest. Gracias to the cheese lovers who suggested this creative moniker.

Paula Lambert, who founded the Mozzarella Company 30 years ago, ranks up with Mary Keehn, Allison Hooper and other cheese pioneers as one of the leaders of the American artisan cheese movement, and her Grassias, which combines goat and cow’s milk in 5-oz. button, showcases the ingeniousness and skill of a cheesemaker extraordinaire. Who else would have thought to add a simple belt of lemongrass to a milky fresh cheese to infuse it with a distinct lemon flavor? The tartness is most apparent in the outer edges of the cheese, of course, but the flavor seeps through the body of the cheese to add a subtle tang.

Unlike last week’s Laurier, Grassias doesn’t transform into a liquidy puddle at room temperature; it retains a solid, chalky texture while still spreading easily. This is a cheese for toast or crackers, not for spooning (unless, of course, you enjoy cuddling with cheese). Enjoy with a chardonnay or another crisp white wine.

Happy birthday to me! My present to myself this year is this pungent slice of Vermont. In my house, age 33 is the Dorset year.

When you think about it, Dorset is a good caseic equivalent to one’s 33rd birthday. The Consider Bardwell website describes this washed-rind, raw-milk cow’s cheese as “a soft-ripening cheese with a rich, buttery texture and seasonally influenced pungency.” While I’m no longer as young as a fresh chevre or handmade ball of mozzarella, I haven’t yet achieved the crustiness of a toothbreaker cheese like Parmigiano – I’m merely ripened (and soft, thanks to two children and a high rate of cheese consumption). While not rich in the financial sense, I am wealthy in life experiences, both good and bad. And I suppose you could say I’ve developed a pungent wit over the years. Not as pungent as Dorset’s aroma, but sharp enough to hold my own against snark and sarcasm.

Gentler than Grayson’s funk but considerably more potent than its goat’s-milk sister Manchester, Dorset’s paste is relatively tame. It’s that pinkish rind that makes the cheese zap your tastebuds and olfactory. Like the trickery that Hook’s Bloomin’ Idiot plays on the senses, Dorset would taste like an entirely different cheese if you chose to forgo the rind (please don’t). Instead, take the bull by the horns and savor the entire wedge with a glass of fruity white wine or ale. As with most birthdays, it’s better to embrace it wholeheartedly than timidly tread into new territory.

Finally, finally, finally, it’s tomato season here in Minnesota! Thanks to the never-ending winter and practically non-existent spring we had this year, our vegetables are all coming in slightly later than normal. But our CSA, Easy Bean Farm, gave us the first taste of the 2011 tomato harvest in our boxes last week, and to celebrate this occasion, no ordinary mozzarella would do. It was time to take our Caprese salad to the next level – bring out the burrata!

For the uninitiated, burrata is mozzarella on steroids, if steroids came with a creamy center. Imagine a little purse of gleaming white mozz with a luscious, oozing middle. Yeah, you’d upgrade, too. We chose burrata from Vermont’s Maplebrook Farm, which brought on Domenico Marchitelli, a cheesemaker from burrata’s origin of Puglia, to craft this milky bomb. The coolness of each bite slides down your throat accompanied by a burst of sweetness from the ripe tomato and the gentle spice of the basil, with the fruitiness of the olive oil and sprinkle of salt and pepper rounding off the flavor. If nature has designed a more perfect combination, I have yet to find it.

As this particular plate was a naptime treat, I did not wash it down with a tipsy beverage, but my next Caprese will be paired with the Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc I am currently enjoying. Cheers to many more weeks of tomatoes to come!

I’ve written many times about my husband’s cheese pickiness – no goats, no softies, no blues, no stinkies. To me, that eliminates the best that cheese has to offer, but hey, that leaves more for me. But he’ll never turn down a smoked cheese (or anything smoked, for that matter – I bought him a smoker for his birthday last month), and when I saw the Willamette Valley Smoked Aged Gouda at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese during my Seattle trip, I knew he’d share it with me. While he did give it a thumbs-up, I have to admit that I’m the one doing most of the nibbling.

Willamette Valley Cheese Company is owned by the Volbeda family of Salem, Ore., and they make their Cheddars, Goudas, Jacks, Harvartis and other cheeses using the milk of their own Jersey cows. You might have a hard time finding their cheeses outside the Pacific Northwest, which is a shame because it’s crave-ably good. The smoked Gouda I bought had the nuttiness you’d expect from a good Gouda, and though your taste buds don’t register the smoke upon first bite, with each chew the smokiness builds in your mouth, resulting in a full, creamy mouthfeel. Cheese snobs often look down at smokies, positing that the smoke serves to hide inferior cheeses, but this Gouda would stand up against any Dutch specimen I’ve tried. It pairs perfectly with a Pinot of either the noir or gris variety (find one from Oregon!) and deserves a hearty wheat or rye cracker as a base.

I recently crashed a virtual Twitter wine tasting of Virginia viogniers. When I read about a sparkling viognier that was part of the line up, from Horton Vineyards in Madison County, Va., I had to check it out. You know, for research purposes. (You’re welcome.) Unfortunately that was the only of the “official” viogniers I was able to find on short notice, but I picked up a bottle of Veritas Vineyards viognier for comparison. The viogniers I’ve tasted thus far are floral and fruity (notes of pear and peach) without being sweet, making them ideal for pairing with cheese. As expected, both of these viogniers are perfect with goat cheeses — bloomy-rinds in particular. And at $25, Horton’s sparkling viognier is another budget-friendly stand-in for champagne.

For the tasting, my cheese board consisted of: goat d’affinois (France), Point Reyes Toma (cow, California), Marieke 2-year gouda (cow, Wisconsin) and Hook’s Little Boy Blue (sheep, Wisconsin). Now Artisanal advised staying away from blues or sheeps-milk with viognier, but I had to be a rebel. Alas, they were probably right — this blue was too acidic for the wine. I was pleasantly surprised by the aged gouda with the sparkling viognier, but the goat was the winning match.

At the all-American goat tasting, we poured the Veritas viognier, which went nicely with each cheese — but again, it was particularly nice with the bloomy-rind Monocacy Gold. If you can get your hands on some Caromont goat cheese from Virginia, you can take the Virginia love-fest one step further. But in any case, look for Virginia viognier for your next goat cheese party — you won’t be disappointed.

I made a truffle mac and cheese for New Year’s Eve 2009 and was disappointed with the result. The cheese sauce seized, becoming an oily, drippy mess, and the noodles were unevenly coated with gloppy cheddar and wads of truffle butter. Yuck. I had been dreaming of a rich, earthy noodle dish with the subtle flavor of foraged ‘shrooms and the silky creaminess of an expensive cheese. What I should have done instead was dig into a wedge of the Ballard Family Dairy’s Truffle Cheddar because it contains all of those flavors and textures without the sad, sloppy pasta.

Well, it turns out that wasn’t an option because I can’t purchase the Idaho-made cheese here in Minnesota, but I found it at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese during my recent trip to Seattle and brought home a healthy wedge. Anyone who loves flecks of umami-rich Italian truffles and the delicate crunch of sea salt will salute this cheese because it offers that perfect package: the mustiness of the truffles, the dance of the sea salt on the tongue and a satisfying mouthfeel, Pair with a full-bodied red wine, some whole wheat crackers, an apple and some grapes, and you have a feast. Hopefully, you won’t have to spend your whole paycheck for the airfare to Seattle to get your hands on it.

As a rule, Minnesotans like to tease Iowans about…well, everything. Their supposed lack of sophistication. Their abundance of pigs. The aroma that results from the abundance of pigs. But Prairie Breeze Cheddar gives Iowans an excuse to flip their northern neighbors the bird. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Cheddar this creamy and flavorful coming from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Prairie Breeze is one of three Milton Creamery cheeses made by the Musser family in Milton, Iowa, and it’s the one that heads north of the state border most frequently. The Mussers, a Mennonite family who relocated to Milton from Pennsylvania almost 20 years ago, collect milk from pasture-grazed cows living on other nearby Amish farms to craft their Alpine-style Cheddar. It’s a favorite of local cheesemongers (Ken Liss, formerly of Premier Cheese Market and now of Lake Wine and Spirits, introduced it to me a couple of years ago), and I can see why. Prairie Breeze fuses the body of a traditional Cheddar with the sweet, delicate flavor of an Alpine cheese. Perfect on top of a wheat cracker, the cheese also pairs well with Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon or a brown ale, according to my Heavy Table colleague John Garland, who interviewed the Mussers a couple of months ago.

Our love of Cypress Grove cheeses has been well-documented on Cheese+Champagne. I supposed my post fawning over Humboldt Fog set the stage for future posts on Truffle Tremor, Cypress Grove founder Mary Keehn and a cheese ball recipe featuring Purple Haze. So when I caught a recent tweet inviting bloggers to create recipes with Cypress Grove cheeses, I raised my hand immediately. (Or more accurately, I typed “ME ME ME!” Apparently, I am 2, not 32.)

What I didn’t expect, however, was the arrival of insulated cooler at my office last week containing a huge quantity of Cypress Grove cheeses – fresh chevres, Truffle Tremor, my beloved Fog and two huge chunks of Midnight Moon and Lamb Chopper – all in a cute branded tote. (C, I guess this means you get full custody of our Murray’s tote from now on.) I don’t think my co-workers have ever seen me this giddy. Needless to say, my day turned around quickly from that moment, and I even shared some Fog (but not too much).

My mind immediately turned to recipes, and my first thought was to create an herb and cheese foccacia using some of the Lamb Chopper, but since it’s still Passover, I can’t mix up some leavened goods until tomorrow night. So in the meantime, I drew inspiration from a lovely appetizer I recently had at Trattoria Tosca here in Minneapolis that combined creamy avocado with sweet beets and shavings of pecorino on top. I eliminated the arugula and pickled red onions in the original version to focus the flavor of the vegetables with the Midnight Moon goat cheese I substituted for the pecorino. All the salad needed was a drizzle of fruity Israeli olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt to come together.

Beet and Avocado Salad with Midnight Moon
Serves 4

3 small red beets
1 ripe avocado
3 oz. Midnight Moon goat cheese
Fruity olive oil
Sea Salt

Trim the beets and place in a roasting pan with a little bit of water in the bottom. Cover with aluminum foil and roast at 425º for 40 minutes. Cool for 20 minutes, peel the beets and cut into half-inch slices.

Cut the avocado in half and remove the pit. Divide each half into half-inch slices (5-6 per half) and gently scoop out with a large spoon.

Arrange 3-4 beet slices on each plate, surrounded by 3-4 slices of avocado. Shave the Midnight Moon on top, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt. Serve immediately.

Pairs beautifully with a Gewurztraminer or medium-bodied red.

One of the beautiful things about American artisanal cheese is that every wedge comes with a story. It’s not an anonymous piece of Brie or Gouda coming from Europe (though we love those cheeses, too). Just the opposite – it’s hard to find an American-made cheese without a captivating tale behind it, whether it be the cheesemaker who bought a goat dairy from her elderly childhood neighbor (Tasia Malakasis of Belle Chevre in Alabama) or the natural resources that have allowed a cheese to flourish (the natural sandstone caves of Faribault Dairy in Minnesota). Shepherd’s Way, the Minnesota farm that produces the Herb and Garlic Queso Fresco pictured above, has gone through many ups and downs in the past five years, but the ultimately hopeful story just makes you cherish its delicious sheep’s-milk cheeses even more.

Spouses Steven Read and Jodi Ohlsen Read founded Shepherd’s Way in 1994 with a small flock of sheep, and within three years it became one of the largest dairy flocks in the state. But in 2005, more than 500 of their East Friesian ewes and lambs perished in an arson fire. Devastated but not defeated, the Reads continued to make limited quantities of cheese by purchasing fresh and frozen sheep’s milk – despite going into foreclosure – and today they have secured new real estate to build their flock again. You can read more about the Reads in my Heavy Table colleague Susan Pagani’s interview with them last year, but let’s move onto the cheese.

The Herb and Garlic Queso Fresco stood out for me because 1) I haven’t eaten much queso fresco outside Mexican restaurants and 2) I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a sheep’s-milk version. But the slice I purchased from Surdyk’s yesterday was a knock-out – cool and creamy with just a hint of garlic on the swallow. Most garlic-studded cheeses hit you over the head with the allium’s flavor, but the subtlety here was refreshing. The cheesemonger told me that in the late summer they can barely keep this cheese in stock since it pairs wonderfully with a thick slice of tomato and a glass of dry white wine. I was too impatient to wait until August and appreciated my wedge solo.

Shepherd’s Way has built up production enough to start distributing its cheese nationally. Check out the list on the website to see if it’s sold at a cheese shop near you. Alternatively, if you’re a Minnesotan, the farm has established a CSA program with pick-up locations in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Northfield.

As Colleen posited in our toast to the women of cheese earlier this month, our gender is a force to be reckoned with in the cheese industry. Further proof came two days after that post, when Katie Hedrich, a 25-year-old cheesemaker from Chilton, Wis., won the 2011 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest. Hedrich, who uses milk from her family’s LaClare Farms to produce the cheese at Saxon Homestead Creamery, wowed the judging panel with her aged goat’s-milk cheese called Evalon, scoring 99.06 points out of a possible 100 and garnering acclaim from cheese lovers nationwide.

Having never tasted this award-winning cheese before (yes, shocking, I know), I grabbed a wedge last week and found the cheese to be quite tasty and intriguing. Described as a Gouda-style cheese with shades of Asiago, Evalon has a light, almost honey-like flavor that is rare among goat’s-milk cheeses. In fact, with its lack of goatiness, I may even be able to get my goat-fearing husband to enjoy it. The cheese’s firm, crystal-less paste gives it a smooth finish, and its sweetness remains on your tongue long after each bite. Evalon expertly balances the line between being accessible for masses and sophisticated enough for the cheese elite. That’s a tremendous accomplishment, especially for such a young cheesemaker like Katie.

Evalon’s delicate flavor matches best with light, fruity white wines or bubblies, or even some sparkling cider. In a recent Heavy Table interview, Katie suggested using Evalon in place of parmesan, and it would also melt nicely into spring vegetable gratins.