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From Rick Steven's Podcast

"Food is culture, cuisine is pride"

Cheese 101 at Murrays

Last night, my friend Hilary took me to Murray's for their Cheese 101 class. Murray's is famous for their high-end cheese selection and quality, and for the proud slogan, "We Know Cheese." We were SO excited. Sealing my lips to the shameful secret that I really do love American cheese, I eased into a night of tiny tastes and pungent sniffs. With a beautiful plate of cheeses and wines and baguettes and dried fruits in front of me, I tried my best to reserve my natural gluttony and truly savor.

The lesson was fabulous. We were taught the basics of making cheese, the vernacular of describing cheese, and the proper etiquette of eating or serving cheese. Our guide was exuberant- as a true cheese lover should be- and knowledgeable about everything from curds to whey. I was very impressed. Even through the overwhelming odors of moldy rinds and creamy innards, the lesson kept me engaged for an entire 90 minutes.

NOW TO THE CHEESE. We were offered: Maplebrook Burrata, Prarie Fruits Farm Black Sheep, Spring Brook Reading Raclette, La Serena, Tomme de Chevre Aydius, Spring Brook Tarentaise, and La Peral. Don't know what any of that means? Let me break it down. We were offered a wide selection of the basic cheese categories:
1) cow, goat and sheep's milks cheeses
2) American, Spanish and French cheeses
3) fresh, bloomy, blue, washed rind, uncooked pressed, cooked pressed, and raw milk cheeses.

Essentially: we had it all. What was amazing about the selection of cheese is that all the cheeses came from the same FOUR ingredients but end up so varied just because of how they're produced. All those people who figured out the different cheese-making techniques must be absolute geniuses.




My favorite was the raclette ("scrapable") cheese, becaues I am such a sucker for melt-ability. But the black sheep was incredible also ("imagine eating a meadow of flowers, ignore the mouthful of mold") , and you can't really beat the milky freshness of a real burrata. As our instructor told us, there's an amazing difference between the "cerebral" cheeses-- like, say, a complex blue-- and the "non-cerebral" simplicity of the creamy burrata. Sometimes you want a "fluffy, milky, buttery, creamy" cheese... and sometimes you'll be brave enough to prefer the "veined, barnyardy, mushroomy, thick" cheese. You can't compare one to the other; each has its time and its place.

All in all- an amazing experience. I now feel more prepared to enter a cheese shop and choose the correct type. Or at least I'm one step closer!