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Last winter, I began making treats for our dogs Emma and Buster using the odds and ends of cheese from our case here at the shop. It was a good way to make use of little bits of cheese that were no longer saleable and to assuage my guilty conscience toward our poor, sad, neglected pooches. (Well, they think they’re poor, sad and neglected, but let me tell you, their lives are just fine!) They loved the treats and quickly associated the aroma of baking cheese with true doggy happiness.

Tim suggested I make treats to sell at the shop. Somehow the idea of spending my time away from the shop making large batches of dog treats didn’t quite work for me. So Tim did a really smart thing: he contacted the good folks at Magic Snacks, a small company here in Portland that makes organic, healthy treats for dogs.

Magic Snacks was started in 2003 by Richard and Nicole Crommelin. They had a new puppy and were disappointed by the lack of healthy, organic dog treats available. After researching canine nutrition needs, talking with veterinarians, testing a lot of recipes, and conducting taste tests with lucky dog park pals, they came up with a product that is wheat and corn free, organic, plaque reducing, and best of all, yummy for the hounds. Magic Snacks was born, and they quickly started selling to pet shops and veterinarians around the country.

For us, Richard developed a recipe that uses Foster & Dobbs cheese, potato flour, amaranth, organic egg, organic olive oil, and organic garlic powder. Buster’s Biscuits are Magic Snack’s first totally grain-free treat (which is particularly good since dogs aren’t actually built to digest grain products). They are very slowly cooked at a low temperature so that they develop a good strong crunchiness, which helps control tartar and plaque build up. The assortment of cheeses that go into the biscuits varies from batch to batch, so each batch will have a unique flavor profile.

Magic Snack’s philosophy is that if it’s not good enough for you to eat, you shouldn’t feed it to your four legged pals either. I’ve personally tried Buster’s Biscuits and they taste a bit like Goldfish (those little cheddar flavored crackers). Though I’d rather just eat the cheese, I’m happy say that they’re a lot tastier than any other dog biscuits I’ve ever eaten. (Not that I’ve actually tried the full range of available dog treats…) I know for a fact that Emma and Buster are very quick to do as I tell them when they see the biscuits in my hand.

Buster’s Biscuits are $4 for a 5 ounce bag. For mail order, we package up two bags for $8.00.

Posted by Tim at 11:22 AM | Permalink

As long as people have been making wine, vinegar has also been made. Actually, wine is just a stop along the way on the path between fruit and vinegar; one could say that vinegar is what wine ultimately wants to be. But while we pay tremendous attention to the wine stage, the fantastically nuanced end-stage is all too often ignored or dismissed as uninteresting. You got your basic vinegar (white or red) and you got your balsamic vinegar – what’s the big deal? Well, gentle reader, read on!

Anything that can be made into alcohol – fruits, grains, rice, tubers, etc. – can be made into vinegar. The sugars ferment and turn into alcohol that, left unchecked, turns into vinegar. This is because of an exceptional bacteria – acetobacter – that uses oxygen to metabolize alcohol, gobbling its way through an bottle of wine, for example, and converting the alcohol into acetic acid and water (vinegar). Annoying though this can be if you’ve had a bottle of Chateau Margaux 1995 turn undrinkable, in the Big Picture it’s a fine thing because vinegar has been very helpful to human history: its acidity makes it a very effective antimicrobial agent and storing food in vinegar (pickling) is one of the best food preservatives ever discovered. In addition to its healthful benefits, acetic acid contributes two flavor elements to food: a bracing acidity on the tongue and a startling pungency in the nose. Yum!

Although it’s a natural process that can happen quickly, the best vinegars are made slowly and may be aged for years before they are considered usable. True balsamic vinegar* is aged a minimum of twelve years before it can even be evaluated; good sherry vinegar is always a blend made over many years. There are three ways that vinegar is produced (one very good, one tolerable, and one awful):
• The Long Time in Barrel method, which includes both the Orleans and Solera styles. Here, wine is kept in barrels over months or years. The barrels are partially full, which exposes the wine to oxygen and natural heat/cool cycles of weather. In the Orleans method, the vinegar stays in one barrel for several months; in the Solera method, the vinegar is shifted through a series of barrels over time, blending younger vinegar with old, and old vinegar with older. Either of these methods takes two to six months to turn wine to vinegar, and the vinegar is often aged for years more.
• The Keep it Moving method, where wine is kept flowing over wood chips that have been inoculated with acetobacters. The conversion takes about a week.
• The Submerged Fermentation method in which oxygen is forced through the liquid (grain alcohol or wine) in a sealed tank. This takes a few hours.

You can’t hurry good vinegar any more than you can hurry love. The good stuff takes time. Slow development allows for layers of flavor; exposure to seasonal weather cycles affords the vinegar time to change (in warm months) and to rest (in winter), aging in wood mellows the flavors. And, as with so many things, the quality of the finished product can never be better than the quality of the raw materials. Crap wine makes crap vinegar, there’s no way around that. And good fruit vinegars (e.g. – raspberry or apple cider) always start with a wine that has been made from the fruit. Don’t fall for the ‘raspberry infused’ stuff – that’s often just cheap vinegar that somebody stuck some raspberries into: it may be pink, it may smell and taste a little like raspberries, but it’s nothing like the refreshing, nuanced vinegar made carefully from raspberry wine.

With good wine vinegars (as opposed to fruit, malt, rice, or grain vinegars), the label should clearly state what kind of grape it is made from. For example, we currently have vinegars made from Barolo, Pinot Grigio, Cabernet Sauvignon, Banyuls, Gruner Veltliner, etc. These vinegars carry forward the characteristics of their parent wines, and will bring those flavor and aromatic notes to any dish. If the label just says “red wine” or “white wine” it is likely made from the cheapest sort of plonk. This stuff is fine if the vinegar is a very minor player in a recipe (like a half teaspoon to a couple of quarts of sauce or soup), but if it’s a serious partner with the other ingredients – in a vinaigrette or gastrique, for example – use a vinegar that tastes good!

If you’d like to learn something about the different flavors of vinegar, have a little taste test. If you have a few vinegars at home, great. If not, come into the shop -- we always have several bottles open for tasting.

The first thing to do is smell the vinegar. Don’t take a big sniff as if you are tasting wine, try just a couple of gentle little whiffs. Think about what you get beyond the pungent notes. There could be floral, woody, fruity, leathery notes, and so many others – just like wine, cheese or chocolate.

Then have a little taste. Sure, it’s not always easy to pick up the nuances of flavor when your mouth puckers up from the acidity, but there are a couple of ways around that: 1) Dunk a sugar cube into the vinegar and then quickly suck on the cube. The sugar will help keep your taste buds open to the other flavors (you just have to mentally separate out the sweet components from the other flavors; or 2) Dip a little bit of bread (anything but sourdough) into the vinegar and then eat that.

Taste and compare a few, and you may be surprised at how different they can be! Banyuls vinegar is light and delicate, sherry is nutty and raisiny, Gruner Veltliner has pineapple and tropical fruit notes. Blueberry vinegar has a rich sweetness, and Tomato has a bright, lively kind of salinity. Let your imagination roam while your tasting – try pairing these flavors with other foods and see what you come up with. How about venison marinated in blueberry vinegar? A splash of sherry vinegar in a simple tomato soup? A hint of tomato vinegar to brighten up a caprese salad?

Vinegar is a wonderful partner to many foods. Invite the good stuff to your table – you may be surprised what excellent company it offers.

Twelve Great Ways to Use Vinegar

Posted by Luan at 05:20 PM | Permalink

1) Salads. If you’ve got great olive oil, match it with equally good vinegar.
2) Bread salads. Use leftover country-style breads & tomatoes to make a delicious bread salad. Douse with good olive oil and vinegar, let it sit for a while to marry the flavors, throw in some olives, basil, maybe some cucumber, and eat it up
3) Sauces & soups: vinegars are the backbone of great sauces like Hollandaise or Béarnaise. A bit of balsamic adds depth to tomato sauces, and a splash of sherry vinegar will add complexity to gazpacho. Brighten the flavor of soups by adding a bit of vinegar rather than more salt.
4) Marinades: balance the richness of meat with the acidity of vinegar. Add balsamic to a lamb marinade, sherry vinegar to shrimp, banyuls vinegar to chicken. Marinate game in a rich fruit vinegar like blueberry or cherry.
5) Deglaze your pan after cooking fish or chicken with a tasty vinegar for an easy, zippy sauce.
6) Fruit salads. Enliven a fruit salad with a bit of fruit or light wine vinegar (like Gruner Veltliner). Balsamic or sherry vinegar on strawberries is sublime.
7) Drinks. For a non-alcoholic summer cooler, try adding a few drops of a good vinegar to cold soda water.
8) Ice cream. Top vanilla ice cream with a few drops of good balsamic vinegar or condiment.
9) Pickling. The better the vinegar you use, the better your pickles will taste.
10) Condiments. Vinegars add an essential zing to homemade chutneys, mustards, ketchups.
11) Dipping sauce. Live like the Romans! Put out bowls of good vinegar alongside crusty (not sour dough) bread. Olive oil isn’t the only thing that tastes great when dipping.
12) Use diluted distilled white vinegar to wash your windows.

Posted by Luan at 05:07 PM | Permalink

As early as the thirteenth century, there are references to an exceptional French cheese: Comté.

The name is French for ‘country’ and it is named after the Franche-Comté region in eastern France where the rugged Jura Mountains dominate the landscape.

In those early days, the wheels of cheese were made by shepherds who spent their summers in their remote huts, high up in the Jura massif where the cows grazed on tender green grass and alpine flowers. The wheels of cheese are very large: roughly 3’ across and 5 inches tall, and weighing about 80 pounds each. It takes about 160 gallons of milk (about 30 cows’ milk from one day) to make each wheel of cheese. This large size developed for very pragmatic reasons: first, it lends itself to a longer aging process than smaller wheels, which in turn makes a cheese that will continue to be edible for a very long period; and second, it is easier to transport a few large wheels down the steep mountainsides than it would be to move many smaller ones (if one’s cart rolled over, all the little wheels could go rolling everywhere and many would be lost, whereas the large wheels are much less likely to skitter away). When summer ended so did the production of Comté; fall and winter milk was used to make other cheeses.

Today, Comté is one of France’s most widely consumed cheese – nearly 40,000 tons are eaten each year. But in spite of this tremendous demand, it is produced under strict AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée) guidelines by small producers. These rules insure that any cheese that carries the name Comté will be made in the traditional way and that the process will not be “improved” in the name of efficiency. The cheese can only be made within the traditional region, using raw milk from Montbéliard cows. Each cow must have at least a hectare (about 2 ½ acres) of grazing and only be fed fresh, natural feed, with no silage (stored, fermented hay and grass). Other rules restrict when rennet is added, how the milk is warmed, when salt is added, etc. Today, about 200 small farms and fruitières produce the wheels of cheese. Their wheels are aged together in a few enormous caves. There the wheels are laid out on spruce boards and carefully aged from four to eighteen months.

At Foster & Dobbs, we work with Daphne Zepos at Essex Street Cheese Company to bring you truly exceptional Comté. Daphne and her Essex Street partner, Jason Hinds, work with Claude Querry, the head affineur* at the Fort Saint Antoine cave. Jason and Daphne select a small group of wheels (usually from only one or two farms, and almost exclusively made from May to October when the cows are still in pasture) that will be matured especially for Essex. Jason travels to France every six weeks to sample and select new wheels and Daphne visits the caves every three months to taste the wheels as they develop and calibrate their selection for the American market. When she determines that a wheel is at its peak, she has it shipped to the States and on to shops like Foster & Dobbs.

Essex Street Comté has a very deep, complex and long lasting flavor. It is always creamy and buttery with hazelnut notes. While some mountain cheese flavors hit with a bang and then quickly subside, Comté is more subtle, layered, with a long finish. The aroma has roasted notes such as peanut, cocoa, butter, citrus, and fruit.

* - Affinage is the term for carefully nurtured cheese maturation.

Posted by Tim at 10:02 PM | Permalink

Stilton ain’t called ‘the king of cheese’ for nothing. When at its best, it is truly one of the finest cheeses in the world – a creamy, velvety paste with a huge spicy aroma, and a rich, cheesiness that is sweet, salty, nutty, and savory with notes of honey, leather, dried fruits, and much more. When it is not good, it is sharp, biting, overly salty and a little sour.

As England’s only name-protected cheese, production of Stilton is limited to a small group of makers who must adhere to strict guidelines, but while the basic recipe and geography is controlled, quality can vary greatly from one maker to the next. At Foster & Dobbs, we carry only Colston Bassett Stilton, which is widely regarded as far superior to the others. Our wheels are hand selected for us by Neal’s Yard Dairy in England, which assures that the cheese is in prime condition when it reaches our case.

Stilton was first recognized as a type of cheese in the early 1700s, and was mentioned in Daniel Defoe’s book, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain 1724-26. It took its name from the village of Stilton in the county of Cambridgeshire, though it believed by many to have actually been first made by Mrs. Elizabeth Orton on her farm near village of Melton Mobray in Leicestershire. The recipe was a family secret, but one of Mrs. Orton’s daughters married an innkeeper and moved to the Bell Inn at Stilton. There, she sold her mother’s cheese to travelers passing through and word of this exceptional cheese spread far and wide. Though Mrs. Orton had called the cheese “Quenby” as its fame spread, it became known as Stilton cheese. The cheese was never made in Stilton and even today, protected by a certification trademark, it can only be made in the three adjacent counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

Colston Bassett Stilton is made in the village of Colston Bassett in Nottinghamshire, from the milk of five herds that graze near the creamery. The creamery has been buying milk from the same five farms since the early 1920s. Since the creamery was established in 1913, there have only been 3 manager/cheese makers: Tom Coy (1913 – 1960), Ernie Wagstaff (1960 – 1996), and Richard Rowlett (1996 to present). Their Stilton is more traditional than the other Stilton creameries.

To make Stilton, milk is gathered daily from the farms and pasteurized, then inoculated with Penicillium roquefortii along with the starter and culture that encourage the milk to form curds. The milk and curds are treated gently at each step of the process, which preserves the structure and results in a luscious creamy texture when the cheeses are mature. The curds are cut by hand into small cubes and allowed to drain overnight. The next morning they are milled, salted and gently ladled into hoops where they stay for several days. The hoops are turned daily to encourage more whey to drain away. Once removed from the hoops, the cheese is rubbed by hand to smooth its surface and seal the edges. The cheese then begins the aging process and is stored in very specific temperature and humidity conditions for many weeks, during which time its characteristic crust develops. For the first month, the cheese is turned every day and after two months the wheels are pierced with stainless steel needles, introducing air into the paste and encouraging the development of the blue veining. It is aged about 4 months and tastes best in autumn and winter, when it is made from the rich summer milks.

Colston Bassett Stilton has a velvety, pale ivory paste that shades toward amber near the rind and is marbled with greenish blue veins. Its knobby natural rind runs tan to grey with patches of white.

A Few Ways to Use Colston Bassett Stilton:

Slice Preserved, fresh walnuts and place atop bite-sized pieces of Stilton.

Top Stem Ginger Oat cookies with a bit of Stilton

Put a slice of Stilton on a plate, pierce it gently with a fork, and pour a bit of Tawny Port over it. Offer bread or crackers for people to smear it on.

Crumble it into salads or atop cream soups.

Colston Bassett Stilton with Port-glazed Pears

Posted by Tim at 10:10 AM | Permalink

A cult winemaker, a confectioner, and some Tyrolean farmers walk into a bar.... There is something about naming the collaborative producers of the Edel & Gut chocolate bar that sounds like a joke. The talent behind this confection includes Austrian cult sweet-wine maker Alois Kracher, pâtissier Hansjorg Haag, and a small group of Austrian farmers attempting to save an ancient cow from extinction. But Edel & Gut (Noble and Good) is no joke--it's an artisanal chocolate bar filled with the most amazing Traminer wine jelly.

Kracher, who has persuaded many connoisseurs that Austria is indeed capable of producing world class desert wines, set out to create a chocolate confection using his premium wines. After tasting the work of over fifty chocolate makers and confectioners, he selected Haag as his partner. Haag developed a unique confection using high quality chocolate, a jelly made of Kracher’s Traminer Beerenauslese wine, and a very particular cream.

This cream comes from cows that spend most of their time grazing in lush alpine pastures: the Grauvieh (“Tyrol Grey”) cattle that have been living in the region for over 3000 years. This ancient breed of ’noble cows’ (as the local farmers call them) is native to North and South Tyrol and have perfectly adapted to the harsh mountain climate. Their milk is exceptionally rich and creamy – ideal for cheese and chocolate – but they only produce small quantities. As a result, they’ve been largely replaced throughout most of the Tyrol by higher-yeilding cows and their numbers have been drastically reduced. A small group of Austrian farmers dedicated to preserving this ancient breed contacted Hansjorg Haag to help create a market for this very limited product.

Each Edel & Gut bar is made by Hansjorg Haag personally. Because of the handmade quality and scarcity of Grauvieh cream, these bars are produced in very small numbers. Foster & Dobbs has a few of these bars to offer now, but when they are gone, they’re gone. 50 gram bar - $12.

Posted by Luan at 05:45 PM | Permalink

Established in 1993, Domori Chocolate is dedicated to recovering heirloom strains and restoring the diversity of cocoa. Domori has a unique approach to their chocolate, selecting and roasting cocoa carefully and in small batches, processing it as little as possible, and peforming some operations by hand that others do by machine. The result is that Domori makes Italian chocolate with the unique, genuine taste and aroma of the cocoa from which it comes.

This holiday season, Foster & Dobbs offers the Domori Chateau Collection, a special selection of three chocolate bars made exclusively with cacao from the San Jose plantation on the Rio El Pilar, located on the Paria peninsula of Venezuela. These single origin bars are made from different sub-clones of special Criollo cacao.

• Porcelana - Subclones of heirloom criollo Porcelana were grafted onto the Criollo of the Hacienda San José in 1998. This chocolate has notes of bread, butter and jam with an exalted smoothness. 70% Cocoa.
• Puertofino - This chocolate is made from a recovered recent criollo subclone of Ocumare 67. Puertofino has notes of caramel, tobacco, walnuts, papaya, brushwood, mushrooms and dates. 70% Cocoa.
• Puertomar - The cocoa of the Puertomar bar is a sub-clone of Ocumare 61. Puertomar has notes of cream, spices, almonds and cherry jam with excellent smoothness and sweetness. 75% Cocoa.

This collection makes a rare treat for the chocolate connoisseur. ~ $16

Posted by Luan at 06:05 PM | Permalink