Leave it to the French to whip up an hors d’oeuvre that’s addictively delicious, easy to make but sounds as if you went to Le Cordon Bleu to learn how. Gougères (pronounced goo-Jer), are cheese puffs commonly served with drinks before dinner and are one of many cheese and pastry recipes the French have produced over the...
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When I told my wife I was writing a column about buying cheese, she said, “What’s to know? You just go out and buy it, right?” Unfortunately, the cheese explosion of the past decade or so has created the enviable dilemma of more cheese– in volume, variety and quality—than ever before. Coupled with prices that routinely...
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Of the 52 Italian cheeses listed on the web site of Cambridge, Mass retailer Formaggio Kitchen (www.formaggiokitchen.com), 23 are from Piedmont. “Every town produces the most amazing cheeses,” says owner Ihsan Gurdal, who describes Piedmont cheeses as “much more refined than any other area of Italy.” The cheeses may be...
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A grating cheese isn’t one that annoys you but rather an aged, hard cheese that can be finely shredded. The quintessential grating cheese is Parmigiano-Reggiano, but there are other grate cheeses, including Grana Padano, Parmigiano’s less pricy cousin, other aged cow’s milk cheeses, such as Gouda, sheep’s milk cheeses such...
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I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve written about American food products catching up to (and sometimes surpassing) the benchmarks from Europe. The most recent American big dog is triple-cream cheeses, which is a group as rich and decadent as it sounds. It comes as no surprise that the French have long dominated this...
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For most folks, mozzarella means pizza covered with a gooey melted mass of cheese appreciated more for elasticity than flavor. Like cheddar, mozzarella—second to cheddar as America’s most popular cheese—has been industrialized. Today the vast majority of mozzarella is lifeless and rubbery with a shelf life measured in...
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