Curious Cook

Curious Cook in the New York Times: A French Camembert Designed for the U.S.

In today's Curious Cook column I write about a pasteurized-milk Camembert cheese here in the U.S. that tastes surprisingly like  raw-milk Camemberts in France. It was designed by the French affineur Hervé Mons, an advocate of raw-milk cheese, to have the best flavor possible given the legalities and logistics of exporting cheeses to the U.S. market.

Camembert is the iconic French cheese, well into its third century, and yet even the most "traditional" cheeses being made today are very different from the Camembert of a hundred years ago. The fascinating story of Camembert's origins and evolution is told in Pierre Boisard's Camembert: A National Myth, published by the University of California Press in 2003. I gave a brief version of one important moment in my original draft of On Food & Cooking, but it was cut from the published book. Here it is, to give a taste of the story that Boisard tells in detail.

           

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Organic produce and yak cheese

In today's Curious Cook column I write about nutritional claims made for organic fruits and vegetables and for yak cheese made in Nepal.

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 Benbrook, C. et al. New Evidence Confirms the Nutritional Superiority of Plant-based Organic Foods. The Organic Center, March 2008.

http://www.organic-center.org/science.nutri.php?action=view&report_id=126

 

Or-Rashid, M.M. et al. Fatty acid composition of yak (Bos grunniens) cheese including conjugated linoleic acid and trans-18:1 fatty acids. J. Agricultural and Food Chemistry 2008, 56: 1654-60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf0725225

 

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Stichelton, a "traditional new cheese"

In today's Curious Cook column I write about a new English cheese intended to be a re-creation of the great blue cheese Stilton at its greatest, when it was made largely by hand with unpasteurized milk.

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Stichelton Dairy