Hölzige Geiss, aka Wooden Goat, from cheese maker...

Saturday, July 14 2012

High-res

Hölzige Geiss, aka Wooden Goat, from cheese maker Willi Schmid, maker of the previously reviewed Jersey Blue and a somewhat legendary figure in the new wave of small-scale Swiss cheese making (Newlyswissed.com had a good profile of him, and Schmid recently held a talk and tasting at the new Bedford Cheese Shop location in Irving Place which I sadly couldn’t attend). Willi’s creamery is located in Lichensteig, in the Toggenburg valley of the Thur River, in the Swiss Canton of St. Gallen.

The Hölzige Geiss is a bark-wrapped wheel, similar to a Vacherin Mont d’Or (or Rush Creek Reserve, Jasper Hill’s Winnimere, or the many other Vacherin-inspired cheeses now dotting the landscape), in appearance if not in flavor. It is in some respects an unusual cheese; I’m not sure if this is always the case, but the bone white, lightly eyed paste is much firmer than one would expect from these style of cheeses and has a slightly spongy, even — as fellow urban cheese maker Jon Bonanno described it — marshmallow’y feel to it. this is not a girdled cheese that you would slice the top off of and eat with a spoon, although that being said, you might plow through the wheel just as quickly once you sample it.

In taste as well it’s hard to quantify: with a pungent washed-rind, sticky to the touch and aromatic, it is mild up front but with a sweet, tangy, complex flavor, with hints of nuts and grass, and with a distinctly arboreal flavor from the fir bark, especially at the rind, like standing in a pine grove with the smell of the pine tar wafting off the trees. There is a slight bitterness as well, almost like a vegetable rennet cheese but attributed in this case, I suspect, to the bark, as I’m pretty sure this is an animal-rennet cheese. There’s very little goatiness at all in this cheese. Like all of Schmid’s cheeses, a delicious, if slightly unusual, specimen.

You can see video of Willi Schmid at work in this segment from Swiss television (in Swiss German only unfortunately). At 3:35 you can see him girdling the Hölzige’s with bark.