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Serious Eats Basics: Choosing Cheeses

Posted by Adam Kuban, January 15, 2007 at 6:30 AM

Master cheesemonger Steven Jenkins, author of the indispensable Cheese Primer gives a quick overview on putting together a selection of cheeses. Offering advice on quantity, variety, and serving order, Jenkins also highlights some of his favorite picks.

TIPS FROM STEVEN JENKINS
Stop at four cheeses: "To serve more than three or four cheeses at a time is an insult to all the other ones that you've chosen."

Offer variety: "Make sure that all three or four cheeses you've chosen are as different from each other as possible ... in terms of intensity of flavor, the style of flavor, the texture, and the animal." Get a goat, a cow, and a sheep, Jenkins says. "Get something that's gushy, that you could just poke at and not even use a knife with, and then I want you to go increasingly more firm texture."

Ugly is beautiful: "Opt for cheeses that are funky-looking, that are rustic-looking, that are primitive-looking—cheeses you never see in a supermarket because they're rough or pebbly or gnarly or moldy. That's going to be a cheese that's worthy of you."

CHEESES SEEN IN THIS VIDEO
Poitu Chevre
Great suppleness and mouthfeel from this goat's milk cheese. Trim nothing away—you eat every speck of this, even the rind, Jenkins says.

Tomme de Cabrioulet
Comes from the Ariège region of France in the Pyrenees. Made from raw goat's milk. Has smooth flavor, ashed rind, very limited in the United States.

Torta del Casar
A Spanish countryside sheep's milk cheese that's not pasteurized. Jenkins says it's his "cheese of the decade." From Extremadura, this "drop-dead" selection has notes of "chocolate, leather, tobacco, and dried fruit."

Serpa
A raw sheep's cheese from Portugal with a fascinating history: It's made only by women at night by the light of kerosene lamps. Serpa's makers have believed for centuries that sunlight will bewitch curd and that a cheese made from daylight-touched curd will turn its eater into a witch or warlock. Jenkins calls it "complex, rustic, primitive."

Smokey Blue
From Oregon's Rogue Creamery, this is a smoked blue cheese made from raw cow's milk and smoked with hazelnut shells. Though he was "underwhelmed to the max," Jenkins says, by the thought of a smoked blue cheese ("I thought it would be too busy"), it was "the cheese that took Europe by storm in October."

ABOUT STEVEN JENKINS
Steven Jenkins is a junior partner and longtime employee of Fairway, one of New York City's most-loved grocery stores, where he serves as master cheesemonger. Jenkins is author of the James Beard Award–winning Cheese Primer and was the first American to be inducted into France's Guilde des Fromagers de Saint-Uguzon, the most prestigious association of cheesemongers and specialists in France.

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