Welcome to Cheese Notes, a personal (and very much in progress) blog created to enable my pursuit of the lactic art and science known as Cheese in all its forms; from cheesemaking to cheese appreciation to dairy and agricultural politics to using this blog to share links of interest and aggregate all the cheese knowledge I’m finding in my daily wanderings and readings. 

I also was a guest on the Cutting The Curd podcast with Anne Saxelby and Sophie Schlesinger in April! 

Although I’m a web developer by day, in my every spare moment I make cheese in a cramped Brooklyn apartment near the banks of the bucolic Gowanus Canal, using a modded wine refrigerator as my “cave”. In addition to a variety of fresh cheeses (Mozzarella, Ricotta, Feta, etc) I’m working with an ash-coated, bloomie-rinded Goat’s milk cheese (working title: Gowanish), bloomy rind Camembert-style cheeses, hard cheeses such as Cheddars, Goudas and Tommes, and whatever other cheeses strike my cheesemaking fancy.

I’m also pursuing a cheese education when I can, including cheese making classes (I took the 4-day Essential Principles and Practices of Cheesemaking course at the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese this April, in pursuit of the Cheesemaker Certification that they offer) and in February 2011 took the 3-day Master Class: Intensive for Professionals at Artisanal and, when possible, making cheese with cheesemakers in the field (Peter Kindle at Hawthorne Valley Farm was kind enough to let me help him in the making of their classic Alpine cheese this summer, after I had taken a cheesemaking class with him; post to come. HVF is just down the road from my hometown of Philmont and across the street from the Waldorf school I attended growing up). 

If you are a cheese-maker, -monger or -mover who would be willing to exchange free labor (I have a good back, don’t mind heavy lifting or scrubbing out vats and will wake up at any time of day or night) in exchange for allowing me to take part in your cheese day, I would love to hear from you! 

I would also be open to trading web work for cheese time. Need a simple site set up? having trouble with a Wordpress template? Maybe we can make an exchange. 

Finally, if you want to exchange your food goods for mine, or are interested in serving my cheese at a supper club or tasting, I would be very interested in discussing it. Unfortunately, due to the tiny scale of my operation I can’t deliver much cheese on the fly so some advance notice would be required. 

cheers,

Matt Spiegler

Find me on Twitter: @mattspiegler

(P.S. the picture at the top is from a meal at La Cloche A Fromage, an amazing cheese restaurant in Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace region of France, where my mom hails from, and where I first braved the washed-rind Munster d’Alsace as a young child. And the picture below is of my own ash-coated bloomy rind chevre.)