Pot Cheese

Perhaps you remember HempRella, the nondairy mozzarella substitute made from hemp seed. The maker--Rella Good Cheese Co. (formerly Sharon’s Finest)--has reintroduced it in hickory-smoked form, enriched with vita mins and minerals to be nutritionally equivalent to dairy cheese.

It’s made from an imported form of hemp seed with the seed coat entirely removed. “Other hempseed [products] have minute traces of THC [the psychoactive drug in marijuana] on their coats,” points out the maker, and they can show up in a drug test. And a nondairy cheese eater doesn’t want that. The package still sports a bright green hemp leaf and the slogan “Hemp Is Hope, Not Dope.”

We Love Multiple Choice

Here’s the latest food contest: the Bouchard Puzzler. It’s absurdly easy--12 multiple-choice questions that the average wine fancier will have little trouble with (except possibly the one about how many three-star restaurants there are in Burgundy), particularly since this is, as it were, an open-book quiz you can take in the privacy of your own home. If you get 10 answers right, you’re eligible for a trip for two to Burgundy for wine tastings and a visit to the medieval premises of the important wine house Bouchard Pere & Fils.

Entry (only one per person) must be submitted by Nov. 3; winner will be chosen Nov. 17. You have to be 21, of course. You can get an entry form from Bouchard Puzzler, care of Clicquot Inc., 717 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10022, or do the whole thing online at Bouchard’s Web site: https://www.bouchardpere.com

Bachelor of Pastry

Johnson & Wales University, the restaurant school in Providence, R.I., has announced the world’s first four-year bachelor of science degree in baking and pastry arts. It has the academic courses and lab classes in cookery that you’d expect, plus general studies courses in world history, logic, ethics, environmental science, psychology and Spanish. (Maybe you were expecting French, but Spanish is probably more useful in the restaurant world.)