Cheese Class set-up from Southern Cheese & Spirits
Hello readers, it’s educational sipping and eating time again! I’m very happy to share some newly posted classes I’ll be teaching in San Francisco this summer (and, yes, September counts as summer in the bay area- it’s when the locals really get in thick of complaining about the 86-90 degree weather). All classes are open for registration.
Please join if you can! And keep posted. I’m very excited to share future classes like the beer-pairing one I’ll be teaching with Master Cicerone Nicole Erny once the dates are set (yup, consider me awed). Plus, I’m packing the classes and events in for my book’s release and will list them here. Full calendars, coming at ya.
A little warm-up:
Here’s an article about one of the co-owners of the Cheese School of San Francisco. Along with Kiri Fischer, Daphne Zepos organizes all classes at the school. Not to mention she also runs one of the top cheese importing companies in the country, she’s the best teacher I’ve ever been blessed with the opportunity to learn from and teach alongside, and she’s one of the most beautiful, lively, and inspirational people around. She does more in a week than most of us do in 3 years and has done more for the artisan cheese industry in the United States than butter has done for toast. In short, there’s no shortage of what we can learn from this woman, and I dream of being even half as awesome as her when I grow up. Read about her here.
CHEESE CLASSES
California Cheese & Wine: Tuesday, July 31st (6:30-8:30pm), The Cheese School of San Francisco
The story of California as told through the microcosm of vine and dairy: It started as the anything-goes wild west, became the promised land, and still churns out hits. In this class you’ll taste the cheeses and wines that have trail-blazed their way onto the tables of food-lovers across the country and discover why they have inspired incredible growth, excellence, and influenced the very identity of West Coast cuisine. Your host and historian is the ‘It’s Not You, It’s Brie,’ blogger and oenophile Kirstin Jackson; and your class companion will be a full tasting of California’s most delicious cheeses and wines.
Pink & Beyond: Tuesday, September 18th (6:30-8:30pm), The Cheese School of San Francisco
Not to be confused with the jug wines of yesteryear, the beauty and delightful flavor of pink wines can be enchanting. Instructor and wine maven Kirstin Jackson will explore how Rosé is made and discover the flavors of strawberries, minerals, rose petals and cocoa powder that characterize the very best of this style. Pair the pinks with carefully selected cheeses and you have the perfect formula for outdoor summer entertaining.
Some other knock-out cheese & wine/beer/spirits classes in the area that I’m eyeing:
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Kristin,
the link on Daphne Zepos is to a summary WS on-line site and then you have to subscribe to be able to read it in full. As I would rather crawl over broken glass naked than give Marvin Shanken any of my money anywhere else I can read it? Sorry if this is a revenue source for you and I love what you do!
Tim
Hi Tim
No, not a revenue source for me. I can get to it for some reason and I’m not subscribed. Let me see what I can do…… I’m pretty bad with techie stuff, but I’ll put my feelers out. Sorry about that.
Me too, me too…I want to read the rest of the article about Ms. Zepos.
Looking forward to at least one of your classes
Thanks.
I would also like to read the article.
Here goes, guys (guess they took down the whole story shortly after I linked):
“Cheese educator, importer and innovator Daphne Zepos fed her obsession on the Greek island of Sifnos, where her family vacationed. “I helped the shepherd boys collect the goats for milking every summer,” she says. “Their mothers would make fromage blanc in the sink and we ate it with hot bread.”
But Zepos didn’t get serious about cheese until she was a line cook at Campton Place in San Francisco in the early 1990s. She was put in charge of the cheese service, uncommon in American restaurants at that time unless they were serving classic French fare. While convincing American diners to accept a cheese course presented its own challenges, there was also the problem of sourcing many of the cheeses we now take for granted, as well as finding food purveyors knowledgeable about cheese.
“Suppliers couldn’t tell me where the cheese came from other than it came from France, maybe Normandy if I was lucky,” Zepos says. “They might also tell me the butterfat. That was about it. It was infuriating.”
She broadened her cheese horizons by taking short sabbaticals to Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, as well as stints in the Basque country, the Jura and the Balkans. “It was like opening a box of treasure, a universe that was incredible. I was hooked,” Zepos says.
From 2002 to 2005 Zepos worked at Artisanal Premium Cheese Center in New York, where she chose and aged hundreds of cheeses in Artisanal’s caves. She also created an affinage (cheese aging) internship program, and, with Max McCalman (Artisanal’s maître fromager), Zepos put together a cheese master class program.
Zepos founded the Essex Street Cheese Co. in New York in 2006. Essex hand-selects only a few artisanal cheeses-Marcel Petite Fort St. Antoine Comté, Cravero Parmigiano-Reggiano, two kinds of Gouda (L’Amuse Signature and small farmstead Goudas, such as Wilde Weide) and a recently introduced small-production Manchego called 1602. Essex sells these cheeses to retailers, such as Cowgirl Creamery, Di Bruno’s and Bedford Cheese Shop. (See http://www.essexcheese.com for a list of retailers.)
Zepos works with cheese retailers in another capacity: as a teacher at The Cheese School of San Francisco. She hopes the school will help elevate the status of those who sell cheese. “Cheese retailers are not recognized in the food industry as craftsmen, like … sommeliers. But they should be,” Zepos says. “There is a craft to putting together an inventory, bringing cheeses back from shipping and a million things like that.” To formalize that recognition, Zepos has been involved in creating a certification program much like the one for sommeliers. The first Certified Cheese Professional exam will be offered in August at the American Cheese Society’s annual gathering, to be held in Raleigh, N.C., this year.
Of course, there wouldn’t be a push for certified cheese professionals if American artisan cheesemakers hadn’t started creating cheeses that compete with the best from Europe. Zepos can claim some credit for this, too. Prior to her time at Artisanal, she worked with the California Milk Advisory Board to develop a program for farmstead cheese, a concept foreign to many dairy cow farmers then involved.
To prove how far American cheesemakers have come, Zepos tells about one of her trips to France to buy Comté. She brought with her Andy Hatch, the maker of Pleasant Ridge Reserve, the Wisconsin cheese modeled after French mountain cheeses like Comté. Without anyone noticing, Hatch sneaked some of his cheese among those the Comté cheesemakers were tasting. “When they found out that it was made in the United States, they almost fell off their chairs,” Zepos says.
Zepos feels similarly. Recently she tasted a batch of Winnimere, a cow’s milk cheese made by Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont. “I had never eaten such a great cheese,” Zepos says. “It was like Vacherin Mont d’Or [one of the great Alpine cheeses] to the nth degree.”
Not surprisingly, when asked for an ideal cheese plate, Zepos included the Winnimere, along with Hoja Santa, a goat cheese from the Mozzarella Company in Dallas (offering “hints of sassafras,” Zepos says); Ossau Iraty, a Basque sheep’s milk cheese (“delicate texture, subtle layered flavors”); Monte Enebro, a goat cheese from Spain (try it with “oily Marcona almonds, preferably with the skin on”); and L’Amuse Gouda, which Zepos suggests having with “a shot of espresso or roasted cacao nibs.” Sounds like a great way to end a meal.”