Cheese / Cheesemongering Questions

[silentchujo]

Hi - This year I quit my 9-5 office job to work the cheese counter at a gourmet grocer (Anybody care which one?). I've worked in restaurants and food retailers before, but never specifically with cheese, so I'm hoping the DR community can help me out. I have learned so much about cheese in the last few weeks but my job doesn't have any training or even books on cheese so I have been piecing together a cheese education plan. It includes:

1. Read a book about cheese (anybody have recommendations?)

2. Keep a cheese notebook (started this, got lots of notes so far but mostly from wikipedia and diary company websites)

3. Visit other cheese shops (is this frowned upon? I'm not going to steal ideas and my intention isn't even to "check out the competition", I simply have never even been to a cheese only shop)

4. Eat lots of cheese (I sample everything with my customers)

There's so much to learn! I'm getting questions about wine pairings, types of honey, cheese knives, fig compote vs. paste vs. jam, etc. And I want to save some brain space for charcuterie facts too since I work in that dept. as well.

Any other ideas on how to be a good & knowledgeable cheesemonger? Would anybody into cheese want to take a field trip to NOVA and check out some cheese stores? I'd like to invite gourmets/experts to visit me at work so I can shower them with samples and they can share their thoughts. There's a whole new vocabulary to learn and I'm just curious to see if i'm tasting what other people are tasting, for example, does the reblochon have a funny taste today or does it always taste like that??

Thanks for any replies.

[Pat]

I love cheese but I'm not much of an expert. I found The Cheese Chronicles very helpful and informative.

ETA: The book deals with American cheeses.

[DanielK]

I'm actually a little bit stunned that a "gourmet grocer" [Whole Foods? Balducci's?] wouldn't have a training plan for a worker in one of the specialty foods areas. Especially one they know is going to have a lot of customers with questions.

[mdt]

Cheese Primer by Steven Jenkins is a very good book.

[deangold]

I too recommend the Cheese Primer but the comments about producers are way out of date and, IMO, less than worthless. The value is in the context.

Janet Campbell has one called the Cheese Course or The Cheese Board or something like that. Good too.

Eat lot of cheeses.

[leleboo]

There's always Monty Python's primer on how not to be a cheesemonger...

I've heard nice things about Mastering Cheese but I've not read it.

I'm sure some of the proprietors of small, independent cheese shops here on the board will have some great ideas, too.

[DonRocks]

Cheese Primer by Steven Jenkins is a very good book.

I too recommend the Cheese Primer but the comments about producers are way out of date and, IMO, less than worthless. The value is in the context.

I also got my cheese education from Cheese Primer - it's a classic, the Kermit Lynch of cheese books.

[KMango]

Contact local farms to find out if you can stop by when they are making cheese.

Reading, tasting, and conversing are all solid plans. And nothing beats having someone narrate the process as they create their masterpiece with small batch ingredients.

I'm hoping Jill Eber pipes in (mmm Pipe Dreams from Pennsylvania) with a few words of wisdom. The cheese classes at her shop are legendarily (ha! that is a real word) educational and flavorful. In fact, I ran into another DR member at last week's class on "little gems".

Kudos to you in your journey, so much to explore.

[deangold]

I also got my cheese education from Cheese Primer - it's a classic, the Kermit Lynch of cheese books.

I am a little leary of the KL analogy. If you look at the producer recommendations, he is just as likely recommend factory made cheeses (and I mean factory made at the time of his writing the book) as he is to recommend smaller producers. But his wroting of the context, history and styles of cheese reminds me of KL or Neal Rosenthal or Peter Weygandt.

[DonRocks]

I am a little leary of the KL analogy. If you look at the producer recommendations, he is just as likely recommend factory made cheeses (and I mean factory made at the time of his writing the book) as he is to recommend smaller producers. But his wroting of the context, history and styles of cheese reminds me of KL or Neal Rosenthal or Peter Weygandt.

Well, I was thinking more that Kermit was out of the blocks early on, especially with "Adventures on the Wine Route." I agree that much of what's in Cheese Primer is dated, but having scoured Dean and Deluca, Fairway (where I'd sometimes see Jenkins himself), etc., back in the mid-90s ... that's largely what was available back then. All you have to do is look at the market for American cheeses in the past ten years or so, and that's more than enough to date the book.

(The cheese situation around here in the early 90s was so bad that I would actually mail order cheeses from Formaggio Kitchen (then again, I would also mail order coffee beans from Starbucks).)

[silentchujo]

Thanks for the book recs. Also, thanks Dean for insisting I try my first cheese plate in 2005 when I worked as a hostess for you.

[zoramargolis]

You might find books by Max McCalman helpful. He talks not only about the cheeses-–their origins and characteristics, but how best to serve them.

[ol_ironstomach]

These days I think of Jenkins as more of an analog to Jackson's World Guide to Beer - enough coverage to pique your interest in styles and traditions you might not previously have been aware of, but without the pretense of trying to declare a victor for all time.

I've become convinced that the cheese world continues to fail us by underappreciating the importance of affinage, the proper aging of cheese to develop its flavor and texture. The majority of producers, even artisanal ones, release their cheeses too fresh and young for consumption. Harder cow and sheep cheeses seem to be relatively forgiving...you're measuring the appropriate time in months or years, not weeks. But goat cheeses have a much narrower window of ripeness, and are revelatory compared to their fresh expressions.

IMHO. Eat lots of cheese. Visit lots of cheese shops. Visit interesting cheese-producing areas (the damn-near virulent liveness of Spanish blues are an adventure by themselves). Visit artisanal producers. And for the love of curds, please don't cut and plastic-wrap good cheese, only to have it sit around for days in airtight ruin.