CTN Favorite Cheese!

I am a big Francophile when it comes to cheese, but my favorite cheese in the whole world is from right here in Northern California...the ultra-stinky, amazingly savory and pungeant RED HAWK. My last mini-wheel may have even been TOO ripe, but it was simply delicious melted on a baked potato (my favorite bachelor lunch or breakfast!). YUM!

[Jenise]

Canadian friends opened the ripest Red Hawk I've ever had recently. Very very epoisses-like. Incredible!

I've never had a stinky cheese. So your are telling me that even though it stinks, it tastes fabulous?

You may be interested in this recipe.


Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk is intended as a stand-alone table cheese, and we rarely recommend cooking with it. Here is one exception: a mouthwatering potato gratin infused with Red Hawk’s indulgent, creamy boldness.


2 tablespoons butter
10 ounces Red Hawk, cut in 16 wedges
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium sized onion, julienned
2 pounds peeled Yukon Gold potatoes, sliced thin
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 cup cream
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Heat a 9" cast-iron skillet and add butter and olive oil to pan. Add onions and garlic and sauté until soft. Turn off heat and add cream and half of the grated parmesan cheese.

Transfer half of the onion-cream mixture into a glass baking dish or casserole dish, and place one layer of potatoes on top. Follow with a layer of Red Hawk wedges. (A customer who prepared this used just 8oz of Red Hawk and sprinkled black pepper between the layers). Add one more layer of potatoes, Red Hawk wedges and the remaining onion-cream mixture. Sprinkle with Parmesan.

Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another half hour or until the top is brown and bubbly.

One of my favorite "wine board" stories -- "I dropped a piece of Red Hawk on the kitchen floor -- and my dog rolled in it!!"

I've never had a stinky cheese. So your are telling me that even though it stinks, it tastes fabulous?

I quote Mike Wolinski, a big fan of cheese:

"To be first-rate, a cheese must offend at least two of the five senses."

I have to admit that some of my very favorite French cheeses--Epoisses, Citeaux, and Pont L'Eveque--are of the washed-rind variety that look horrible and smell even worse. Yet, if you have the courage to taste them, they have exquisite flavor and a pleasant, creamy texture.

So yes, even though it looks like something from hell and smells even worse, it can taste wonderful.

-Paul W.

Canadian friends opened the ripest Red Hawk I've ever had recently. Very very epoisses-like. Incredible!

One time when I was wine tasting in Burgundy, I went to a hypermarche in Beaune. They had a wide selection of Epoisses in the cheese aisle, all packed in the traditional round wooden boxes. Needless to say, the aroma in that cheese aisle was pretty pungent.

Next to the Epoisses, there were some cheeses that were hermetically sealed in a tight double plastic wrapping. The label merely said, "Fromage plus puissant".

That's "very strong cheese", for those who don't speak French.

The Epoisses (REALLY stinky) was left unsealed. THIS cheese was double-wrapped in carefully sealed plastic.

I didn't buy any of it. The prospect of what it must have smelled like still keeps me sleepless at night.

-Paul W.

You may be interested in this recipe.


Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk is intended as a stand-alone table cheese, and we rarely recommend cooking with it. Here is one exception: a mouthwatering potato gratin infused with Red Hawk’s indulgent, creamy boldness.


2 tablespoons butter
10 ounces Red Hawk, cut in 16 wedges
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium sized onion, julienned
2 pounds peeled Yukon Gold potatoes, sliced thin
3 cloves garlic, diced
1 cup cream
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F

Heat a 9" cast-iron skillet and add butter and olive oil to pan. Add onions and garlic and sauté until soft. Turn off heat and add cream and half of the grated parmesan cheese.

Transfer half of the onion-cream mixture into a glass baking dish or casserole dish, and place one layer of potatoes on top. Follow with a layer of Red Hawk wedges. (A customer who prepared this used just 8oz of Red Hawk and sprinkled black pepper between the layers). Add one more layer of potatoes, Red Hawk wedges and the remaining onion-cream mixture. Sprinkle with Parmesan.

Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another half hour or until the top is brown and bubbly.

Wow - over 1/2 lb of Red Hawk to 2 lb. of potatoes. That would not be your average potato gratin!!

[Jenise]

I've never had a stinky cheese. So your are telling me that even though it stinks, it tastes fabulous?

I would say it's heavily aromatic; whether you find that stinky-bad or stinky-fabulous is kind of a personal thing. I'm on the side of fabulous, but then I've never met the cheese I thought went over the boundary. Bob used to call the cheeses I like "mummy cheese" after a cheese tasting of aged cheeses in Burgundy where he and the couple we were travelling with hit their limit with some ash-laden cheeses (where I blissfully soldiered on), but now he loves them all too. IOW, you can acquire a taste for them, but I'm not sure there's a reason to do so if you don't enjoy the kind of wine that makes the best accompaniament to ripe, pungent cheeses.

[Jenise]

You may be interested in this recipe.

Sounds delicious!

Asking for a favorite cheese is like asking for a favorite wine! It depends on what you're having with it. We keep at least 10 different one in the fridge, and still have to pick one up for something we're having. With a full bodied red wine I still go for a nice very sharp cheddar.

The recipe is reminiscent of tartiflette.

In my experience cheese is very fragile, much more so than wine. Which explains why all too often the imported cheeses in the States look exactly how I feel after arriving from a long trip around the world. And so it's not surprising that the best quality and local cheese would have the most appeal.

On this side of the country, I'm particularly enamored with cheeses from Hawthorne Valley. The rich vivid lively clarity of the best French cheeses in France.

That said, we mostly buy imported cheese for cooking.

In an 'entertainment/seminar/tasting' I did once for a festival, I paired eight different wines with cheeses made in the same area. Naturally, I had to have a Burgundy/Epoisses matchup.

Afterwards, I had a woman come up to me and thank me. She went on and on about how she found the epoisses absolutely repulsive---so stinky she could barely stand sitting there when it was placed it front of her. When she tasted the wine, a well-aged 1er Cru Meursault that had gone all the way into that toasted hazelnut phase, she said she really wasn't all that fond of the wine either.

Then, she said, not wanting to miss out on the whole point of the seminar/tasting, she steeled her resolve, held her breath, and tried the epoisses with the admittedly and intentionally over-the-top Meursault...and fell in love.

She made a point of informing me that she was stopping on her way home to shop for both THAT cheese and a selection of different white Burgs to have her own exploratory tasting.

The two did marry perfectly, I admit. Sum, parts and all that.

I've never had a stinky cheese. So your are telling me that even though it stinks, it tastes fabulous?

Oh, you do not know how most certainly it does!

Get yourself immediately to a good cheese shop!

One of my favorite "wine board" stories -- "I dropped a piece of Red Hawk on the kitchen floor -- and my dog rolled in it!!"

ROFLOL!

Continuing onward with CTNs...

Just north of where I live is a little farm town called Winters that is reinvneting itself as a "farm-to-table" kind of place. Turkovich Winery, whose wines tend to the massively fruity and jammy side of things, also make CHEESE.

The Winters Cheese Company Mountain Cheese is quite nice....nutty, fruity, yet also savory and a little funky. Outstanding tacky washed rind? Which I am enjoying quite a bit!

YUM!

OK, what does "CTN" mean?

Guess.

WTN, CTN...

You mean WOTN??

Frank, for practical reasons when this site was reformed using PHPBB software, tasting notes were tagged with WTN to make them searchable. CTN, by extension, is the cheese version.

Mark Lipton

Continuing onward with CTNs...

Just north of where I live is a little farm town called Winters that is reinvneting itself as a "farm-to-table" kind of place. Turkovich Winery, whose wines tend to the massively fruity and jammy side of things, also make CHEESE.

The Winters Cheese Company Mountain Cheese is quite nice....nutty, fruity, yet also savory and a little funky. Outstanding tacky washed rind? Which I am enjoying quite a bit!

YUM!

We pass by Winters all the time. I will be sure to put that on my list for our next trip down I-5 . Do they have that Red Hawk cheese?

Continuing onward with CTNs...

Just north of where I live is a little farm town called Winters that is reinvneting itself as a "farm-to-table" kind of place. Turkovich Winery, whose wines tend to the massively fruity and jammy side of things, also make CHEESE.

The Winters Cheese Company Mountain Cheese is quite nice....nutty, fruity, yet also savory and a little funky. Outstanding tacky washed rind? Which I am enjoying quite a bit!

Ah, Winters... I primarily remember it for the infamous "Winters Cutoff" (now I-505) and the endless traffic jams on it on Memorial Day weekends. It's good to know that there's now a reason to stop there, Brian.

Mark Lipton

Winters has been getting a bit of a reputation for itself lately. Several local wineries have tasting rooms in the downtown area and the Putah Creek Cafe has reportedly been serving very tasty food. Even the Buckhorn (an old deer-head-on-the-wall steak place) has upped their game.