No biting the personnel

After the last seminar at the Seattle Cheese Festival, I met up with acquaintances who had been wandering the market. S caught up with us. The four of us spent the next hour sampling the cheeses. S usually doesn’t like cheese: the taste and texture are foreign to her palate. I’d never thought of cheese as an acquired taste but it makes sense. If your parents immigrated from europe, you probably ate a lot of cheese unavailable at the regular grocery store. The festival was perfect of her.

Soon out-of-town friends of our acquaintances joined us. They’d already been walking the concourse for some time and had bought one cheese: a camembert from Mt. Townsend Creamery. I’d also bought myself one cheese to bring home that day. The same cheese actually. This camembert has the usual attributes of a camembert: a white rubbery-like exterior, a yellow-ish or beige creamy interior which changes from soft at the edge to hard in the middle. The selection was still too young to be runny and pungent. It was a lot milder, soft (yet still firm) and salty. The light flavor of salt adds a nice contrast to the camembert’s classic taste. Out of all of the cheeses of the festival, we’d both decided on this hidden gem.

Once home, I couldn’t resist and cut my self a slice. Out of habit I also cut one for S. When I think of accessible cheeses, Camembert doesn’t make the list. Surprise of surprises, S likes it. She likes it enough that since then we have bought 3 at the farmer’s market. Now I need to convince her that Pont-Levesque and Munster are only slight variations.

As a newcomer artisan cheese maker, Mt Townsend Creamery has some incredible cheeses. The creamery is only 10 months old. They’re based in Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. They make 3 cheeses: a tomme, a camembert and specialty cheese. Their tomme is also wonderful although they don’t yet have any aged one. We’ll certainly buy more and more of them in the future. We wish them luck and, if the opportunity arises, we’ll go visit.

P.S.: Seattle Times review.

A few weeks I spent the good part of a day at the Seattle Cheese Festival. The event is organized by Delaurenti - we love that store - in Pike place Market. The festival is a great opporunity for all to discover wonderful cheeses and meet local and foreign producers. In addition to the concourse, there are the educational seminars. This year I attended two.

The first was a tasting of washed rind cheeses and a conversation with Hervé Mons. Mr. Mons was one of the 4 winners of the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France in the cheese section in 2000. It was the first time that this discipline was judged in the contest. In short, this title is a recognition by their peers that an individual is at the top of their field in the country. Quite an honnor. Mr. Mons was at the cheese festival representing the Cooperative Isigny Sainte-Mere. They make some of the best known French cheeses including my favorite, le Pont-Levesque, which is often considered “stronger” than camembert (something they also make). If you find their cheeses in the US, you’ll notice that they clearly stamp it Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC); the same laws that protect french wines. Champagne - aka sparkling wine anywhere else - is a good example of this. All of this to say that Mr. Mons makes a great speaker: he knows his subject matter and is passionate about it.

The second seminar was a pairing of Washington wines and cheeses. It was setup as a panel of local cheese makers, local wine makers and 2 food critics. The panel was hosted by someone from Beecher’s. I’m not a huge fan of Beecher’s cheese although I recognize they’ve done a lot for the local cheese industry. It’s hard to walk by their store in Pike Place Market without stopping in to taste their products and watch them work. To their credit, their cheese was one of the best in the wine tasting: it enhanced almost every wine paired with it. One of the critic though was Laura Werlin, author of The All American Cheese and Wine Book. She makes her living educating people about cheese and wine. She ran the panel for the same seminar last year. Her strengh I think is in helping the non-initiated understand how to taste cheese (and wine); what are the motions; what smells, tastes, textures and colors to look for; what’s important to you. After all, as she says, it’s all about you: did you enjoy the combination? I won’t list the wines or the cheeses mostly because I don’t think the experiment was a success: very few of the combinations tasted significantly better than their parts separately. However, it was still a lot of fun. The room was packed and you could see people enjoyed themselves while learning a lot.

Finally, there was the cheese concourse: an opportunity to try a lot of different cheeses. Whatever your taste might be, I’m sure you would have found something. Sadly, I did not see Pont-Levesque. There were also few aged cheeses (typically more expensive). The various representatives in the main section had stuck to cheeses they knew almost everyone would enjoy. There was a special section for local producers of small volume. While the rest of the concourse was free, this section had an entry fee of 5$. Out of all the cheeses, this is were I found the hidden gem of the festival. More on it later.