Every so often I get a chance to taste something that is so different, I feel like I am tasting the world anew. Since my lust for life extends from my stomach, it doesn’t happen often — but it did last weekend, when I brought home a bouncing baby bundle of Tumalo Farm‘s award-winning Classico farmstead goat cheese.
To understand how much I have wanted to try this cheese since first hearing about it about half a year ago, you must understand two things:
1. My husband and I love goat cheese so much we have created a song for it.
2. I hate to use the phone, but I actually started calling around Salem to see if anyone was carrying it. No dice.
I finally found a wedge of it, sandwiched unassumingly between some brie and some chevre, at the mother of all Whole Foods in Lake Oswego, OR.
Tumalo Farms is another example of some Oregonians who, something on a whim, quit their comfy high-tech jobs and chuck it all to start an artisan cheese farm in the Cascades, in the triangle formed by Bend, Sisters, and Raymond, in Central Oregon. Cheesemaker Flavio DeCastilhos set his sights on creating “food for the soul” — a farmstead cheese, meaning it is created from the milk of a single herd of cows and at a single location.
The farm’s “Tumalo Classico” recently won the gold medal at the United States Champion Cheese Contest, the oldest cheese and butter competition in the country. I don’t know anything about the parmesan that beat it, but it must be flecked with ambrosia-flavored gold dust because I just can’t imagine anything that tastes more interesting.
The classico is about one point shy of being as hard as a Gruyere and has a nice, hard rind that must be cut away. The cheese is creamy, with a pale yellow color, and tastes subtly of goat’s milk and cumin. The way it mellows on the tongue is deeply satisfying. In fact, the taste is so complex that the Dr. Kracker flatbreads (currently on sale at Life Source!) I have pictured here all but overwhelm it — we eventually just ate it slice by slice.
Is it just me or does this cheese look like it has a halo?
the mother (and father) of all whole foods is in austin, tx. it actually was one single store, then a couple in town, before it became a chain/brand. one of my fellow journalists invested early and retired (before 50) when it exploded
Don McLeese! Keepin me honest all the way from Iowa!? I think I was using it more as a metaphor — as in, the Whole Food motherlode is in Lake Oswego, but point taken. Why didn’t you give me some major stock tips as part of my graduate education?
This cheese is super nummy!!
http://www.stevescheese.biz/
Steve Jones is the most awesome cheesemonger on the planet! Have you discovered it yet? He’s not like Stumptown Duane – down to earth and humble. Worth the trip. Square Deal Wine is not bad either, but not quite the destination in-and-of-itself.