Archive for the ‘Cheese’ Category

Used to be that fine goat cheese was something my wife and I would enjoy while traveling in France. Ten years later, as did the Smart car and Sephora, artisan goat cheese showed its face in Edmonton. When Smoky Valley Goat Cheese arrived at our City Market this spring, I wrote about it immediately. It changed our household food culture overnight, and since then our cheese has been hand crafted by Holly Gale.

As you may know, I’ve been on a bit of a crusade of sorts lately, doing what I can to help one of too many small artisan farm operations  struggling with viability. And yes, there’s a reason their new website looks shockingly like my blog, as I have recently been charged with re-creating their online face, asap.

I often wondered how Holly could make such good cheese right out of the gates, but now I know – she’s been making small-batch, farmstead cheese for over 30 years. In the video she discusses some of the challenges [everpresent in the regional farming gig], inspirations, and goals for their artisan dairy. Forgive the impromptu camera folly as the goats played with my tripod during the interview, and ate my list of questions for Holly. Ah, goats.

I’m starting to find it charming how small producers of food stuffs often could use a hand in the marketing department. Smoky Valley Goat Cheese lacks a slick veneer of branding, and their website’s lovely description of their St. Maure seems to come directly from another website. Their sales pitch at their new place at the City Market Downtown needs work. But if one’s judging by the taste alone, it doesn’t matter.

We purchased their St. Maure Saturday morning and it is a lovely piece of hapiness all covered in white mold. From what I can tell it lacks the French version’s ash coating and straw down the middle, but otherwise brings me back to eating fine goat cheeses from the market in Chagny, Burgundy. [St. Maure is from Touraine, I know: besides the point]. At this stage of ripeness it smelled of grasses, was super creamy and lovely in texture, followed by a very nice goat cheese touch on the finish. We couldn’t stop eating it, and quickly decided that this particular product would be on our ‘to buy’ list on our weekly jaunt to the downtown market through the summer – primarily to top salads and eat as-is. And with bacon.

There was hole in the artisan goat cheese market here that badly need to be filled, and it’s a joy to see it closing.

Update a week later: They just upped their price from $5 to $8 on this. We didn’t buy it this week out of protest.

It was the last pack from the 2008 antelope – an animal that had become revered as the game meat of choice over the past couple years around here, so tying into it was an event. A ‘leg roast’, which in this case meant the whole leg below the hip and above the knee [think a larger leg of lamb?]. It had stored well enough, I had a fire going to grill a piece, and we’d see what inspired us with the rest. Turns out the whole leg ended up over the fire with various tweaks of seasoning and herbs. I’ll spare you the photo essay and skip to the memorable part: smoked leg of antelope fried in 8-yr old vermont cheddar fat, topped with that cheese’s fried crisp.

What we did: It was a piece maybe the diameter of your wrist/forearm, and we smoked it well off direct heat, but the coals were quite hot so it still was a fairly hot smoke. The meat went a rich tan-burgundy in color, and retained an extremely tender texture [something notable about this antelope in general]. While it rested, we fried the cheddar in a cast-iron pan over some coals, collecting the solids as the fat ran about the pan [take it off when it starts to deep fry in its own fat kind of like how bacon does when it's near-ready], and set the fried cheese aside to crisp up [it crisps up when it cools, not in the pan]. The smoked meat then went into the hot cheese fat for a very-quick fry. Then the chip was cut up and went on top. Simple, rustic, damn tasty, and memorable. Great texture contrasts, great dairy funk, great richness added to a lean meat. Certainly worth a go again. The downside: it takes 7 years to get drawn again for an antelope tag up here – so it will be a few years yet before I can enjoy this again.