Cheese has a spot in my holy trinity of food. There’s wine. (Oh dear God, yes!) There’s bread. (Hopelessly devoted to the kind you can knock on, like a hollow door.) And there’s cheese. (Brought some for lunch because I’d be drooling like a bloodhound after interviews for this story.)
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve weaned ourselves from supermarket Monterey Jack and Cheddar (right?). We started dropping French names. Mon Dieu! How about that Brillat-Savarin triple cream. And Quebec seduced with its cheese savoir faire. I was addicted to La Sauvagine for years.
But in the last decade, especially after the 100 Mile Diet phenom, B.C.’s been getting cheesier and cheesier with a growing number of small artisanal and farmhouse operations. We’ve grown from about three or four to about about 15 in that time. We’re vastly outnumbered by the thousand or so artisanal cheesemakers in the U.S. but still, of late, my cheese radar has been shrinking in radius. While the Saltspring Island Cheese Company is pretty well known (why, I’ve even seen it at Costco and it’s crossed provincial borders into stores), and Moonstruck has been producing mighty fine, rich cheeses for about the same time, starting up in the late ‘90s, my current obsession is for Farm House Natural Cheese’s La Pyramide ash-ripened goat cheese (from Agassiz) which has held me hostage by being so good. Creston’s Kootenay Meadows Farm (formerly Kootenay Alpine Cheese Co.) also has me pinned and surrendered. Their award-winning Nostrala and Alpindon are lovely. (They both took second place in the 2010 American Cheese Society competition, coming in behind a three-time grand champ.)
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