A cheese shop for the serious foodie

Cheese lovers, Atkins dieters, and the lactose intolerant, rejoice! Tucked away in the little shopping center next to the Sawdust Festival grounds is another fabulous foodie find. It’s the only serious cheese shop for many a mile where you can have the pleasurable adventure of tasting from a choice of more than 65 cheeses. Make your selections and they will be cut to order.

For any serious cheese lover, this is as far from pre-packaged supermarket cheese as Thunderbird is from Chateauneufde-Pape. Speaking of which, there is also a newly opened wine shop with hand-picked wines from around the world, and many of them are from small producers.

These are further extensions of Nancy Milby’s Laguna Culinary Arts, which also includes a home chef cooking school and cookware shop on Coast Highway and a professional chef program at the canyon location, as well as a catering division and culinary adventure tours.

Do not be intimidated if you are a cheese novice. The knowledgeable and helpful staff, including Holton Britt, will introduce you and guide you through the joys and complexities of cheese, tasting as you go.

On a recent trip, we were impressed by the perfumed lushness of the Purple Haze Goat Cheese, fragrant with lavender and fennel, as well as the amazing El Boschetto, a creamy mixture of cow and sheep’s milk infused with the flavor of white truffles.

Most cheese eaters are familiar with Maytag Blue but American artisanal cheese makers are now producing many new varieties, including the California Point Reyes Blue, which was also delicious. In addition, there is a small variety of cured meats, salamis, pates, olives, crackers and baguettes. These can be included on lovely cheese platters, complete with attractive explanatory labels that can be ordered for meetings and parties or just for pure gluttony.

Another tasty and convenient offering is the fondue package that includes a grated three-cheese mixture, a clove of garlic, a lemon and a baguette. Take it home, put it in a pot with some wine and, voila, dinner for four. From 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday evenings, a wine and cheese tasting for $15 is offered. Reservations are recommended at (949) 376-0263).

There was a time when no French meal was complete without its cheese course. In the days when French cooking dominated American haute cuisine, no fancy restaurant worth its salt was without a cheese cart. A proper French meal included pounds of butter and cream in innumerable courses. Then, after being stuffed to the gills, the requisite cheese trolley was wheeled to the table with a reverence bordering on the religious. Refusing it was simply not an option. Let us not forget, dessert was still in the wings.

Then in the late 1970s, a sea change began. Pundits can debate forever what the causes may have been, but certainly one of them was a growing awareness of the relationship between health and diet. At high-end restaurants the cheese course virtually disappeared.

Now, many years later, the cheese course has re-emerged along with the resurgence of steak houses. Perhaps it is just a reflection of the endless cycles of taste. Maybe it’s the Atkins diet (the revenge of the anti-carbohydrate coalition), or maybe it’s just a longing for simple un-fused food. Who knows?

In any case, new health research no longer demonizes cheese. For those who have denied themselves the pleasures of cheese because of lactose intolerance, medical studies show that fresh cheeses, like ricotta, have very little lactose and fermented, ripened cheeses have no lactose at all.

Cheese’s relationship to heart disease has also come into question. Empirical research has revealed that the French and the Greeks, who eat more cheese than anybody, have among the fewest heart attacks. It also appears that fermented dairy products do not lead to heart disease. A lesser-known benefit of cheese consumption is that it helps to prevent cavities by counteracting the harmful effects of acids on the teeth. In addition, the fat content of cheese contains fatty acids that have an anti-bacterial effect that actually prevents tooth decay.

Did you ever ponder over the origin of cheese while you lay awake on a sleepless night? Well, ponder no more. Credit for the discovery goes to nomadic Turkic tribes in Central Asia or to the people in the Middle East.

A common tale tells of an Arab nomad, carrying milk across the dessert in a container made from an animal’s stomach, who discovers the milk had separated into curds and whey (caused by the rennet from the stomach lining). Folklore aside, cheese most likely began as a way of preserving soured and curdled milk through pressing and salting it. Rennet came later. The earliest archeological evidence of cheese making is to be found in Egyptian tomb murals dating to about 2300 BCE.

Cheese can be made from the milk of cows, goats and sheep as well as buffalo, horse, reindeer, camels, yaks and combinations thereof. The only required step is separating the milk into solid curds and liquid whey using acidification and either rennet or rennet substitutes.

Rennet is an enzyme extracted from the stomach lining of young cattle. Now, we also have vegetable rennets that are extracts from the Cynara thistle family. The simplest cheeses are made from milk that is curdled and drained with little other processing. Such cheeses are soft and spreadable with mild taste.

Some hard cheeses are heated to force more whey from the cut curd. This changes their texture and taste. Most cheese has salt mixed into the curds for flavor and preservation. Other techniques that are used include stretching (mozzarella), cheddaring (cheddar) and washing (gouda).

Most cheeses achieve their shape when the curds are pressed into a mold. The more pressure applied, the harder the cheese. Cheeses can be aged from several days to several years. Aged cheeses, such as brie and camembert, are made by allowing white mold to grow on the outside of a soft cheese for a few days or weeks. The mold forms a white crust that contributes to the smooth or runny texture and more intense flavor.

Blue cheeses, such as Roquefort, are produced by inoculating loosely pressed curds with molds that grow within the cheese as it ages, causing blue veining and assertive flavor. Washed rind cheeses (limburger) are periodically bathed in salt-water brine, which makes the surface amenable to bacteria that impart pungent odors and distinctive flavors.

All of this information, probably more than you ever wanted to know, is all about creating different flavors and textures in cheese but the bottom line really is does it taste good? Only you can decide and the process is so much fun! Bon appetit.