The week after Thanksgiving can be one of those weeks. So, I was quite surprised when I had a week of bad cheese, and none of it from those kinds of sales. I don’t want to go into detail here (sorry), partially because I am still negotiating credit on some of this stuff. But instead of a “Gordon’s purely arbitrary cheese obsession of the week” entry, I was inundated with cheese that made my tongue hurt.

The first thing that was killer was about 200lbs of cheese that a distributor ordered and then – because of their own corporate machinations – sat on for two months without attempting to sell. The cheesemaker asked me, as a favor, if I would take it all and sell anything I could at whatever price I could. I was excited because I love this person’s cheese, and I figured anything salvageable could be amazing. Sadly, not of it was.

When I think of awful blue cheeses I think of bad Spanish Cabrales. Not good Cabrales, mind you. I love that. But when Cabrales gets too old it turns dark, even nearly black at times. The paste gets as hard and shardy as shale and it is too intense to even swallow. And of course I’ve tasted this. The difference between a cheese professional and a well informed cheese enthusiast is this: I have tasted almost every cheese at its best and at its worst. This salvage blue: probably the worst blue I’ve ever tasted.

Partly that’s because it started out strong but nice. When I first put it in my mouth I was thinking about calling the maker, encouraging them to age their cheese longer, even special ordering extra aged wheels and selling them as something like, I don’t know, Gordonzola Extra-Aged, Select Reserve Aged for Extra Time. The cheese trap was sprung. A moment after this fleeting thought, the cheese turned on me. What was strong became bitter. What was fruity became excess fermentation. What was butterfat became rancid. This was up their with bad Cabrales in intensity. This was a cheese I couldn’t spit out fast enough.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only bad cheese of the day. Another cheese, one of my favorites actually, came in like it was trying to trick us. Out of 24 wheels, only 3 were sellable. The three that were sellable were awesome and, unfortunately the one we tasted upon arrival was one of the few good ones so it wasn’t until we sold a few that we realized that there was something very, very wrong. Unlike the good examples, which were complex, rich, earthy, and awesome, the bad ones were diaper-smelly, bitter, cloying and intense.

This cheese – a department favorite – cast a pall over the rest of the day. We almost cried at the disappointment of its badness. This is a cheese that we all love to recommend when we have it. Its great potential turned to evil was a metaphor we didn’t want – or have time — to contemplate on the retail floor.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

It was a Christmas present, actually. But the Harley Farms farm dinners are so popular that even though we arranged it in December the first available spot was May 7. Now that I’ve attended one, I see why!

Starting at 4 PM with a full tour of the farm, you really get a sense of how much love goes into the care of the goats and land, and how much effort goes into the cheesemaking. Here are my parents walking through a field of goats. They hadn’t yet discovered how much these beauties can pee and poop!

Here’s my dad trying to extricate himself from one curious lady:

We got to meet some milkers, the llamas, and some babies. Here’s Laurie pushing the head of a baby male goat. She said that they love that and she should know since she raised goats herself awhile back. I didn’t catch the names of these goats, but since they are males, let’s call them Birria and Meatloaf.

Then we got to go to the cheese room. Now, there are a million pictures of me in a hairnet. There’s even one on the top of my website. But I’d never gotten a picture of my parents in hairnets before. Thanks Laurie!

I suppose if I was really a food blogger instead of a cheese worker I would be giving you the details of the Harley Farm acreage, the number of goats, the volume of output and throwing lots of silly adjectives around. But I’m pretty sure I’ve done some version of that before and I don’t know whether people ever really read that stuff anyway. I know I don’t unless I’m making signs for the store. No, the thing to know about Harley is that it’s a small, sustainable farmstead dairy where the goats are well cared for and they make great fresh goat cheese.

After we tasted cheese, we went upstairs for the dinner. I meant to take pictures of the food, but I was having too good a time (and too much BYOB wine) to remember to pull out my camera. What did we eat? OMG. First, a warm carrot, beet, asparagus salad, with feta. Then goat cheese raviolis. This was followed by the main course of spring lamb with mint sauce. We finished with fresh, warm ricotta with strawberries. Everything was awesome. Even better was sitting around the big, hand-carved wooden table and meeting all the other folks who were in attendance. The Harley folks put on a great event.

If you are going between Santa Cruz and San Francisco on HWY 1 and don’t stop at the Farm Store (and at Duarte’s Tavern for ollalieberry pie) I don’t know what you are thinking.

But May is truly Dee Harley month for me. We will be together at the New Leaf Cheesemakers day (along with Garden Variety and Schoch Farm) on Sunday May 15 (New Leaf Community Market Westside 2-5, free) and then at the California Academy of Sciences NightLife event where I’ll be reading, Dee will be talking and there will be a ton of cheese to eat (Thursday May 26 in San Francisco, $12, $10 for members)

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

Our existence by itself is political but that is often not enough for armchair philosophers. I suppose its fair for people to be mad at decisions we make, but in a democratic workplace of 230 people, I can’t give a definitive answer for why we made a decision, I can only say what issues some people brought up and that the majority decided. People, even leftists, buy-in subconsciously to the spin-speak of places with huge PR budgets. We are a democracy: messy, opinionated, and sometimes wrong. It’s unwieldy at times, but it is also our strength.

Recently, after being on a panel discussing alternative workplaces and the philosophy behind them, I was confronted by an audience member.

“You said you pay a living wage, how do you figure that?”

“Well, our starting wage is a couple of dollars over the official SF hourly rate.”

“San Francisco doesn’t have a living wage ordinance, it has a ‘minimum compensation’ ordinance* according to my calculations, a living wage would be $18 or $19 an hour.”

I pointed out that we have an unbelievable health plan free to workers, real profit sharing, discounts on food and numerous other benefits that make our wages even higher, but none of that was really the point and he didn’t seem interested. Because I was representing the co-op, Mr. Leftist simply couldn’t speak to me as a worker, he was speaking to me as the boss. He probably felt brave speaking truth to power and all that except that he wasn’t speaking truth and he wasn’t speaking to “power”.**

Of course, I was also exhausted since I had been working at 7 AM that morning and this conversation happened after 10 PM. You gotta love a conversation about work where it goes on too late for most people who work for a living to attend.

At another talk – actually one where I was doing a reading from my book –someone confronted me about “a friend” that once worked there and got fired and how they had all these criticisms of the co-op. Of course, I was at a disadvantage because 1. I didn’t know who they were talking about, 2. Even if I did, I might not know the situation and, 3. Even if I knew both those things, I certainly couldn’t talk about it in a public setting because it’s illegal. There are one of two cases in my 17 years at the co-op where the folks got fired and I disagreed with it, but in most of the other cases, people had it coming. If someone gets caught padding their timecard***or stealing they aren’t going to tell their friends that. They are going to say, “It’s not a real co-op.” “It’s a popularity contest.” Or some version of “I spoke truth to power.”

The funny thing is that there are certainly valid criticisms of our co-op. We have no real models for what we are doing and have made stuff up as we went along. We could have better systems for some things and we could have more actual democracy in some cases. One of the reasons I finally came around to opposing coupons**** is that I felt like it was affecting our internal democracy. Everyone was too tired and too busy to go to meetings.

But the bottom line is that we are not a philosophical wet dream of a worker co-op. We are an actual worker-coop: the biggest retail worker-coop in the country. I’m proud to work there, warts and all. It’s not a workers’ paradise, it’s a constant work in progress.

*I looked it up later and this is true. At the time of its implementation, the term “minimum compensation” was substituted for “living wage”. However, according to the we are still well above the number calculated in SF for a single person.
**To be fair, he was speaking to 1/230th of the power in the store.
***We operate on an honor system in many ways so offenses like padding time cards, giving out discounts to people not approved for them etc. are firing offenses.
****When I represent Rainbow publicly, discussions of why we stopped coupons are totally the new “Why don’t we boycott Israel?” And no I won’t discuss the second question here.
*****Clearly this whole entry (and anything on this website) is my opinion and I am not speaking for Rainbow here.

Read this article at its original source, Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

River’s Edge is absolutely one of my favorite American cheese makers. Not many folks are making ripened goat cheese of this quality in the U.S. Plus, they are a tiny, family-run, farmstead cheese operation. What is not to love?

Here are some lovely, young Humbug Mountains. We love these, though the “Up in Smoke” (fresh chevre wrapped in a bourbon-spritzed maple leaf) is the River’s Edge cheese we sell the most.

Pat and her daughter Astraea were super accommodating to let me visit with basically no notice. Pat showed me around, Astraea made us fried-egg sandwiches, and then we ate a bunch of cheese. Without buying direct, my selection has been limited, but every single one of the cheeses were incredible in their own way. The St. Olga and the Astraea – neither of which I had tried for a long time – were tremendous harder, washed-rind cheeses that, honestly, I had forgotten all about.

I was in cheese heaven and they didn’t even have the Mayor of Nye Beach, which is – I think – one of the best 2 or 3 washed rind goat cheeses in the country.

You know what they did have though? A schnauzer.

He was so cute and hairy that I wasn’t 100% sure, so I had to ask. I don’t remember Pat’s exact words, so I am going to make up a quote. “We don’t pretty up our Schnauzers out here in the country. Those foofy haircuts are for soft-pawed, city dogs.”**

Of course, they also had goats, some of the most beautiful milkers this soft-pawed, city boy has ever seen. They are a mature ad well-loved little herd.

We hung out for a while talking about tsunamis, floods, goats, organic dairy, dairy inspectors, and the cheese biz. There was so much good cheese I didn’t want to leave! Still, finally I started my wet drive back to our coastal rental.*** When I got back I discovered something very interesting.

It seems that all schnauzers like River’s Edge Chevre.

*Pt Reyes Toma, French Comte, Australian Cheddar (aged 3 years), Beehive Barely Buzzed, Australian marinated Feta, and a wheel of P’tit Basque.
** Pat totally did not say this. I’m hoping she finds it amusing though.
***Favorite fun-fact of the day. The area we were staying in used to be known as the “Pat Boone Estates” because he was an original developer.
**** For a video of Pat making cheese, check out Cooking Up a Story.

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

Here’s a cheese from River’s Edge at the Texas ACS:

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

I am a coastal boy at heart though, so when the property manager said a tsunami was heading straight for us, I fully admit panicking a little, assuming we had minutes, not hours. Either way, by the time I woke up enough to comprehend the warning, I knew I wouldn’t be going back to sleep, even if my first suggestion was, “Ok, the wave is supposed to hit at 7? Let’s pack, go back to bed, and set the alarm for 5.”

Instead, like many of you, we sat glued to the (well, one of the four) TV for the next few hours, watching those horrible Japan videos over and over and some very good local news from Portland. At around 4:30 the reverse 911 call told us to get up and get out and at 5 the tsunami sirens went off with recorded “evacuate immediately” messages. Cop cars roamed the streets looking to wake folks up. Both Laurie and I went back and packed a few more items into the car. After being lulled by hours of TV, the sirens gave us another hit of adrenaline and off we went to find the tsunami shelter.

If we were locals, we probably never would have left. Or we at least would have gone back to sleep for a bit.

Indeed, the noticeable absence of lights and rush from the neighbors gave me pause at I packed the car at 4:45, but who was I – with no real, local knowledge of the area and decidedly in the tsunami inundation zone – to argue with the official warnings? It is my firm belief that tourists and non-locals should not cause hassles for the local volunteers and first responders by being stupid, so we left. But really we could have driven a quarter mile up the hill and waited it out with no danger to anyone. Of course the shelter — the local elementary school — did have bathrooms and coffee, and that was nice.

We drove back about 4 hours later, right before the official all-clear. By then Schnitzie couldn’t stop barking at the people walking their cats on leashes*** and half the parking lot had cleared out. We were cold and tired. When we got back , everything was just like we left it and – in the day light — less scary.

The waves were still a little big and ominous though, I was drifting in and out of sleep, still worried about being back just enough to start me awake every couple of minutes. Finally, someone on TV said that the tsunami warning was back down to an advisory and I drifted off to three hours of solid sleep.

So yeah, I’m fine. Laurie’s fine. Schnitzel’s fine. Not much really happened here.

Japan’s not fine though. Those were some pretty scary scenes…

*Central heating set at 68 degrees? I doubt there are a week of days where our apartment reaches 68. Central heat makes me think I’m in a convection oven.
**Everything else about this place is better than our apartment. We just sprung for a King bed a couple of years ago and it’s hard to go back.
*** no judgment

Read the original article on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

cc: Governor Walker, Senator Fitzgerald, House Speaker Fitzgerald

James Robson, President
Stan Woodworth, Vice President

WMMB,

The current Wisconsin budget crisis has caught the attention of many people outside of Wisconsin. The proposed budget, as it stands right now, seems to many of us as an unprecedented and undeserved attack on one of the most basic rights of organized labor: the right to collectively bargain. Customers at our store have been asking about what they can do. Some have even brought up their willingness and desire to boycott Wisconsin products if this current budget passes.

You know me. You know I have been a long-time supporter of Wisconsin cheese and that we carry a lot of it, especially for a California supermarket. I have no wish to stop carrying any of your numerous cheeses that we have on our shelves. (It varies of course, but right now we have about 40 different cheeses from about 15 Wisconsin cheesemakers.) I love Wisconsin cheese.

However, if this current budget passes it will make Wisconsin a bad word among many people who shop and who work in our store. Since you are in the marketing business, you can well understand that the kind of result a political decision like this can have in many of the cities that sell a lot of specialty cheese. You know that it doesn’t take much of a decline in sales for a perishable food to lose its place on the shelves; that’s the nature of the business. It doesn’t even require an organized boycott, just the change in consumer perception from Wisconsin being a “friendly state of cheese lovers” to “that mean-spirited state that hates unions and teachers”. Because I care about Wisconsin dairy farmers on a personal and professional basis, I do not want to see that happen.

For the good of Wisconsin cheesemakers I personally ask that you put what pressure you can bear on the legislature to not pass a budget that strips organized labor of their rights. This is an issue that goes beyond Democrat or Republican and beyond state lines. Taking a budget crisis (that many see as manufactured for this purpose) as an excuse to end the right to collectively bargain is wrong.

This is not a threat. I am not speaking for my workplace because, as a cooperative, my workplace is a democracy and does not have an official position on this issue. What I am saying is that the Wisconsin state budget has ceased to be a local issue. What happens next may very well affect every business in the state. Since Wisconsin’s most visible business is cheese, I think you owe it to your members to take a stand against this budget.

Thank you,
Gordon Edgar
Cheese Buyer

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

I’m from a casserole culture, and as casseroles go, I will say I like my tuna noodle casseroles a little better than my mac and cheeses, but it’s a pretty close fight. Being an, ahem, cheese professional, I suppose I should switch my allegiance publicly to mac and cheese, but often mac and cheese is functional, a way to clean out my fridge of all those cheese samples and odds and ends.

Compared to other contests I’ve judged, this was a pretty loose: no score sheets, no comments, just eat and compare. Hey, you could even talk to other judges! Which was great because I was judging with Heidi Gibson from the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen and Tamara Palmer, “Resident Judge”.

Anyways, I’d say that I would have been happy eating a full plate of almost any of the dishes served to me. When one is put in the position of judging, you have to make some distinctions that you would never make if you were eating at a friend’s house, or even a restaurant. Side by side, one dish being a little more bready, or a little too salty is much more obvious than in real life. After tasting them all, and then re-tasting some of our favorites though, we were pretty unified in our decision that the Boffo Cart “Vermont Cheese Forest” was our favorite.

Here it is all nestled snuggly in its maple-sugar bacon nest:
.

I will say that our 2nd place winner: Fowl Mouthed Ladies “Quack and Cheese” (with duck confit) stopped me in my tracks when I first tasted it. I would have been happy if this had been the winner as well. Our 3rd place winner: JazzyB’z Recipez “Pork Belly Mac” was really the most classic version we had, at least to us. I think Heidi was the one who suggested that if we did this again there could be prizes for classic vs. freestyle.

The People’s Choice winner was one of our favorites too. SF Delicious Catering made “Smoked Up Mac” that came with habanero-infused olive oil on the side and little jalapenos on top. Super good:

I really loved the pickled accompaniments with the runner-up People’s Choice award. I can’t figure out how to make a cent or euro symbol with my keyboard but they called it “The Crusty Vermonter” even though they admitted using mostly Velveeta after they won their award. Debbie Does Dinner’s Butternut Squash Mac ‘n Cheese is also worthy of mention for making the one I would most likely copy for home use. I don’t cook a lot of meat at home, but I do love some squash and hazelnuts!

(People’s Choice Winner, People’s Choice Runner-up and the Butternut Squash cooker looking like she wants to kill me for taking her picture which I didn’t notice until I uploaded the pics at home)

Here’s the Photographer’s Choice winner. It sure looked good:

So anyways, an awesome time was had by all. If anyone out there is having cheese or cheese-oriented cooking contests, I’m available as a judge. Especially if there’s free beer.

Look how happy Laurie is with her plate of food!

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

I have no idea why they call it “Persian”. I mean, as opposed to our other Australian marinated feta, this one is made with cow milk which seems less Persian than most other soft, brined cheeses. Supposedly, its been marketed that way in Australia for years. In fact, there was a lawsuit about whether or not Yarra Valley owned the name “Persian Fetta”. They lost. I also found an amusing debate on the internet from 2007 about whether this feta had anything to do with Persia/Iran. The consensus seems to be, “no”.

I bought these because the cheese is good and it’s one of those dirt-cheap mistake cheeses, 8.8 oz cans we are retailing for $2.99 ea until they are gone. But, the same way I wouldn’t sell the “French” Yogurt cheese that was made in Wisconsin and won’t sell the “Marin Cheese Company” Feta that’s made in France, I avoid misleading labels. We are making it very clear that it’s actually from Australia, but I’ll be glad when it’s gone… even though the can is actually very cute and I bought some myself. We carry this cheese regularly under a label that just calls it marinated feta.

Oh, and the question in the first sentence was a trick. The answer was negative five minutes. The customer saw me opening the box. I hadn’t even gotten it on the shelf yet!

Read the original post on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.

20. 6/8 Alexander Books, SF I will fully admit that I don’t get downtown much. Alexander Books does lunchtime reading downtown and I never knew it until they asked me to read. A great, interested crowd materialized out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast at the end. A great way to spend a lunch break

21. 6/11 Readers Books, Sonoma What a beautiful place to read. Outdoors right off the town square. This is a great little bookstore and a very food-knowledgeable crowd. And, since it was in the North Bay, friends of my parents showed up.

22. 6/23 Get Lost Travel Bookstore, SF Another place I read at that later went out of business. The owner was a regular customer for years and this was one of my favorite bookstores in SF. I never missed a visit to Get Lost before I went anywhere on vacation. Lee’s partner got a job in another state that he couldn’t turn down so it’s understandable why they closed up shop. But they are very much missed. Get Lost was one of my favorite things in San Francisco.

23. 7/12 18 Reasons, SF with Laura Werlin Great little space for food talk Doing an event with Laura was fun. Our different styles worked together well and we had fabulous cheese.

24. 8/2 Encuentro Café, Oakland Very crowded and I kept it short because people were hungry. They made an amazing glossy, color poster for the event. This place is part-owned by a co-worker’s wife and a bunch of Rainbow workers who live in the East Bay showed up. Encuentro is a terrific veggie restaurant and wine bar and after I was done some folks called me over to talk about vegan cheese.

25. 8/24 Calf and the Kid, Seattle, WA OMG, my ears popped on the airplane so I couldn’t hear, I was snotty from judging 100 cheeses during the day, and the restaurant next to the cheese shop had their music on way loud, but this was an awesome event at an awesome shop. Up the Cheese punks!

26. 8/26 American Cheese Society Conference, Seattle Usually these kinds of sit down signings suck, but this was completely rewarding. It was great to be in a crowd of peers who (at least the ones who approached me) appreciated my book. If my book had been unpopular here, I would have considered it a failure. Satisfying and fun!

27. 9/18 Skylight Books, Los Angeles I fell in love with this bookstore. I wanna write another book just so I can read there again. Hopefully this time my car won’t die on my way home. Oh, and reading in front of a stack of Ellroy’s new book was hilariously ironic.

28. 10/7 Litquake at Book Passage, SF I’ll be honest, I didn’t sell many books here, but I had an awesome time. It was a crowd that cared deeply about writing and food and who laughed at all the right parts of my reading. Litquake is really a fun thing to participate in because it really does bring out the book lovers.

29. 10/23 Cheese Plus, SF Back behind a table trying not to take things personally. At least I got to hang out with Sasha Davies for a couple of hours. The Cheese Plus events are really fun places to be, I wish we could do these kinds of things at Rainbow, but we just have a pee-soaked alley, not a busy pedestrian street.

30. 11/2 SF Public Library RADAR Reading Series This was me, Novella Carpenter, Dori Midnight, and Chelsea Rae Klein and woah, what a packed house and diverse readers/artists. My only reading that included queer goth cemetery porn on the bill. Probably the youngest crowd I read to (my crowds were usually 35-50 years old I would guess). I had to explain what Reagan Cheese was and break the news that the Frugal Gourmet was likely a child molester.

31. 11/7 Pt. Reyes Books Pt. Reyes, CA I got to share the reading with Jill from Pt Reyes Farmstead Cheese and I think we encouraged each other to tell cheese gossip in public. I won’t repeat it here, but the folks who were there enjoyed it for sure.

32. 11/12 Oakland Museum of California (Lonely Planet), Oakland I got to sample out cheese and work with my old buddy (and co-worker) Rana. They made awesome trip itineraries for local cheesemaker visiting. The bookstore there is fabulous and the crowd that attends these free Friday night events is full of real people. I would do another event here in a second.

33. 12/18 Rainbow Grocery Cooperative, SF Ha. I actually did a book signing at the store. I had meant to do a reading at some point but we don’t have a good space for it. It was really weird standing behind a table at the store and not selling cheese. Still, it was a good thing even if I did get a little mocked by co-workers. My book made a great holiday gift!

34. 12/12 18 Reasons Book Club, SF I was honored when 18 Reasons made my book their book for December. The folks there all had read it and had interesting questions. It was a real treat to do this kind of event where people already know your book. I would love to do more of this in the future because it was a lot less answering of questions I get at work (“What’s the best way to store cheese?” was asked at every event) and more about themes in the book. A wonderful experience.

The only problem with all these events was that Schnitzel didn’t like that I was away so much:

Read the original article on Gordonzola’s blog.

Gordon Edgar is the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge.