Today was National Grilled Cheese Day, and it also saw the grand opening of Brooklyn’s newest cheese-related shop: The Brooklyn Slate storefront, at 305 Van Brunt St in Red Hook! Founders Kristy Hadeka (whose family slate quarry provides the raw materials for the boards) and Sean Tice were on hand to greet visitors, and there was a station outside serving grilled cheese sandwiches.

Crafters of the best slate cheese boards out there, and the company largely responsible for making this stone a now-ubiquitous option for cheese presentation (not to mention providing the backdrop for many of the photos on this site), the store features lots of slate, of course, in many shapes, sizes and colors. In addition, there will also be cheese knives, domes and assorted gear, goods from Formaticum, housewares, linens, books and magazines, and much more. If you needed an excuse to head out to Red Hook, here’s yet another one. 

In a reminder of how much Red Hook has gone through post-Sandy, the store has a water-line painted on the brick wall, indicating where the water reached to during the flood (you can see it in the second-to-last photo). Thankfully the store had not yet been built out when the storm hit, but there was still considerable work and repairs necessary to get back on track and ready for the opening. 

So head on over and get yourself some slate! 

Brooklyn Slate Company
305 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn NY (map)

Urban Cheesemaking: Two from Yoav Perry

Tasted at a recent cheesemakers meetup in Brooklyn: two cheeses from Yoav Perry, NYC “urban cheesemaker”. on the left is his Vacherin-style cheese, or as he describes it, an experimental cross between multiple styles including influences from Vacherin, Reblochon, Chevrotin and Robiola.

Yoav notes: “I was going after harvesting what’s available in our surrounding NY nature to create a winter cheese with a Vacherin-like texture and some woodsiness, but it was not a classic Vacherin formula.” In pursuit of that local terroir, Yoav harvested straps, or “sangles” from walnut trees in the forests of upstate NY and used those as his bark wrappings (traditionally, Vacherin uses spruce; he also is working with those, using sangles imported from Europe, in some of his other cheeses. The second photo, posted by Yoav on Twitter, is of one of his new Vacherin-style, spruce-wrapped creations).

This wheel was made with a mix of goat and cow’s milk. The walnut provides a striking black band around the outside, with the top and bottom rinds brown and gold and textured with a mix of natural molds and yeasts. The ivory-colored, lightly eyed paste on this wheel had not yet reached the fully scoopable consistency of a vacherin, but it was still quite soft, oozing and bulging out from the rind as it warmed. The texture was silky and melting in the mouth, and the flavor was milky, woodsy and a bit nutty, with smokey, tannic and vanilla notes. Tasting a cheese like this, it’s hard to believe it came out of an urban “cave”, located in a Manhattan apartment! 

On the right is his “NY Bagel” (that’s just a tongue-in-cheek working title for now), a cow’s milk, pressed tomme made in a ring, or “couronne” mold, similar (in style, if not format) to a Corsican style tomme (hard and rough exterior, made in baskets). The ring shape, while visually appealing, is not merely a gimmick; the aging of the wheel tends to be faster and produces a slice with an even ripening towards the center. In a sense it ripens similar to how a “log” of cheese would ripen — albeit one that has been turned in on itself like Ouroboros. The rind is a pale amber and gray, rough-textured and rippled. The paste, pale yellow, is firm and dense, on the milder side, with a sweet, nutty, salty flavor, tangy buttermilk notes and a hint of gameyness. 

Unfortunately, you can’t get Yoav’s cheeses at your local cheese counter (yet, but that’s likely to change in the future), but in addition to being a cheesemaker, Yoav also runs a cheesemaker supply company — Artisan Geek — providing everything you might need to get started on your own wheels, whether it be cultures, molds, papers, equipment, etc. A new website for the company is currently in the works, but if you’re interested, hit him up on Twitter, @YoavPerry. Yoav really knows his cultures and if you let him know what you’re going for he can make recommendations as to what you might want to try.

Made In Brooklyn: The beautiful cheeses of Jos Vulto, urban cheesemaker extraordinaire (plus a wedge of Beecher’s Best In Show winner Flagsheep on the right, courtesy of Elena Santogade aka @WannabeMonger). These pictures were taken at a recent urban cheesemaker meetup in Brooklyn. 

Actually, Jos is a soon-to-be former urban cheesemaker (but still living in Brooklyn), as he has built a small creamery and aging facility upstate in Walton, NY, and will be officially selling under the “Vulto Creamery” name within the next year. However, many of the cheeses seen here were aged in Brooklyn, in a converted cellar space of his former metalworking shop in Williamsburg — his “cave” of many years — or beneath his house in Crown Heights, and the results are impressive. Suffice it to say, if you saw these wheels in the case of your local cheesemongers, you’d never guess at their urban provenance. These cheeses look — and taste — like they emerged from an old stone aging room in Switzerland or Vermont.

The cheese on the far left in the first picture is his washed rind, raw cow’s milk tomme Ouelout, the recipe for which is included in Gianaclis Caldwell’s new book Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking (recently mentioned on this blog many times). Also included in the book is a profile of Jos, detailing his journey from Holland to New York and from metalworker and artist to urban cheesemaker.

Jos has his own blog as well, where you can follow his adventures in cheesemaking and his quest to build the creamery in Walton, including, in his latest post, photographs of his first “legal” make!