Posted by Jamie Forrest, June 23, 2009 at 1:45 PM
"On a couple of occasions I've been bold enough to try a bowl of cereal with one-percent milk."
I have been humbled, surprised, and, frankly, a bit overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and advice in response to my post last week about my lactose intolerance discovery. You have shared many ideas, from the practical to the fanciful.
Probably the best advice I received was to make an appointment with my doctor to get tested. Lots of folks said that gallbladder problems, dairy allergies, and celiac disease can all produce symptoms similar to lactose intolerance. I have heeded this advice and will be seeing my doctor soon. I have a feeling he'll send me straight to a gastroenterologist, so I may not have any official updates here for a while, though I do think this is probably the best and safest approach.
But back to my adventures, which is why, I think, you are all tuning in. Apparently lactose intolerance (or whatever is ailing me) isn't so black-or-white. Over the past week I have been experimenting in a somewhat haphazard way with dairy of different stripes.
I was able to eat, without issue, a half-glass of one-percent milk, a small cup of yogurt, and a delicious Queso Blanco Torta from Cinco de Mayo, my local Mexican restaurant.
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Posted by Jamie Forrest, June 16, 2009 at 1:45 PM
"My fate was sealed. I was lactose intolerant."
About a month ago I went with my family to get some Argentine-style gelato from Cones on Bleecker Street. A couple of hours later I had an unbelievably awful stomach attack, which I first attributed to food poisoning, but later reasoned that it might have been a bout of sudden-onset lactose intolerance (since no one else in my family had had food poisoning, and they ate the same things I did).
A week later, I ate a slice-and-a-half of pizza and had a similar (but not quite as bad) reaction. Oh no! My wife then reminded me that I had had the same symptoms a few weeks before the gelato event, from some Tibetan food that had a cottage-cheese based sauce. What? Lactose Intolerance? But I write the Serious Cheese column for Serious Eats! What was I going to do?
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Posted by Jamie Forrest, June 9, 2009 at 4:20 PM
Photograph from Goulven Champenois on Flickr
The combination of crusty dough and melted cheese has spawned some of the greatest foods in the world. Pizza and grilled cheese come first to mind for many Americans, but the United States can hardly claim ownership. Indeed, thousands of miles across the world, in a land wedged between the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east, the bread-and-cheese meme has perhaps reached its apex in the form of the Georgian food khachapuri—literally, "cheese bread."
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Posted by Jamie Forrest, June 2, 2009 at 2:00 PM
Photograph from Balakov on Flickr
For some reason the American kitchen is a breeding ground for useless gadgets, tools, and knickknacks. Do we really need a separate tool to make balls out of melons? (Actually, melon ballers are quite useful for many different tasks, but that's a subject for another post.)
Living in New York City, where most apartments have tiny kitchens with only a handful of cabinets, I am forced to be ruthlessly Spartan with my gadgetry. This is why I am generally opposed to cheese knives. I tend to follow Alton Brown's golden rule: never own a kitchen gadget that has only one use. So what kinds of knives do work well with cheese? My suggestions, after the jump.
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Posted by Jamie Forrest, May 26, 2009 at 2:00 PM
Most people, when they hear the words coffee and cheese in the same sentence, wince at the thought of two such vastly different foods coming in such close contact. But Utah's Beehive Dairy is boldly cutting straight through that taboo with their coffee-covered Barely Buzzed, a blue ribbon winner in the 2008 American Cheese Society Awards. The first time I'd tasted it was back in March at Beecher's Cheese in Seattle.
As I bit down through the cheese, the bitter nuttiness of the espresso and the caramel sweetness of the cheddar-style cheese made me realize this is a match made in some really quirky and hip corner of heaven.
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