“Hello My Name Is”: Tasting Notes

Coach Farm has created a new, raw goat’s milk cheese, and now they have partnered with Culture Magazine to find a name for it! As part of the “Hello My Name Is” competition, they have sent a big box of samples of this new cheese to 6 cheese bloggers — including yours truly — to taste and review the new cheese, post photographs, and even feature a giveaway of Coach Farm goodies. See the previous post for the full details and a little bit about the history of Coach Farm! But now let’s get into the cheese:

Tasting: Raw Goat Cheese

The wheel is large, around 8 inches in diameter and 4 inches in height. The Rind is firm and thin, an even blanket of snowy white mold over a pinkish-brown underlayer. There is a thick ivory creamline just under the rind, the sign of proteolysis beginning to breakdown and liquify the paste, but oozing is minimal even as it warms, just a light bulging outwards and no liquid runniness, indicating a balanced aging. Beneath the creamline the paste is evenly developed, smooth, and crumbly with a beautiful fudgy texture, a little bit chalky. 

The aroma of the cheese is bright, citric and milky, with a distinctly yogurt-y quality and hints of mushroom and mold. The flavor is well-balanced, excellent salt levels, tangy and creamy, with subtle mineral and floral notes, and a touch of gamey sharpness and bitterness at the creamline. This is a mild but complex cheese with a very clean finish; the best bite includes a bit of paste, creamline and rind. 

I tried the cheese with a few pairings as well; the first was with Kimchi (hat tip to cheese master Tia Keenan for introducing me to the kimchi/goat cheese concept); the fiery bite of the kimchi was tempered by the cheese while also bringing out fruity and sweet notes in the cheese. The second was a pickled beet, which was also lovely, although it’s hard to go wrong with the beet and goat cheese combo, they just pair very naturally. The third was with honey from the Brooklyn Honey CSA; while the components of the pairing were delicious on their own, the cheese was a little lost under the assertive, complex sweetness of the honey. 

I have to say, I’m quite curious about the culture blend and the aging protocol that’s being used with this cheese: being a raw milk cheese, they are required to age it for at least 60 days, which would normally be a long time for a cheese of this style. The development of the creamline, the moisture levels and the intensity level of the flavors are closer to what I would expect from a younger cheese of this style. There’s clearly been a lot of tweaking and finessing with the make and affinage, to create a wheel that can age for that long a period without over-ripening, either in the direction of being overripe, or hardness.

So now, it’s your turn! Do you have any ideas for a name for this cheese? Get over to the Hello My Name Is page on the Culture Magazine site, and submit your naming ideas! You can read my previous post to get a sense for the history of Coach Farm (or check out their site), perhaps that will inspire you as well. 

Personally, I like the idea of a name that pays tribute to the terroir of their farm: perhaps Hudson River Goat, or Taghkanic Bloom. But that’s not for me to choose, get over to Hello My Name Is and submit your own ideas! And don’t forget to add a comment to this post describing your favorite goat cheese pairing, for a chance to win the Coach Farm goodie bag.

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)

Sadly, I missed last weekend’s Big Cheesy 2013 (see my post from last year’s event), but SeriousEats has a good slideshow of the competing grilled cheeses. Melt Shop was declared the big winner for the 2nd year in a row, but all the entries look pretty darn tasty to me:

Scenes from The Big Cheesy, New York’s Grilled Cheese Cookoff

This weekend, Openhouse brought back their grilled cheese cookoff, The Big Cheesy. There were some heavy-cheese-hitters lines up, namely (the returning champion of cheesiness) Melt Shop, Milk Truck, Lucy’s Whey, Murray’s Cheese Bar, Say Cheese, Sons of Essex, and ‘wichcraft.

We scoped out the event to bring you a blow-by-blow roundup of what NYC’s grilled cheese masters had to offer. Click through the slideshow to see!

The Winners

First: Melt Shop
Second: Say Cheese
Third: Sons of Essex