Welcome back to Good Taste, a menu for eating well in the Bay Area. After being invited to attend the SF Cheese Fest at the San Francisco Ferry Building on Sept. 21, it was exciting to discover that many of the best new bites from the event are already available at my favorite cheese counter at the Rainbow Grocery co-operative in San Francisco. Here are the personal highlights from the evening:
Mt. Eitan Creamery
Omer Seltzer created Mt. Eitan Creamery as an “atelier to create cheese as a form of art.” A first-time participant of SF Cheese Fest, the Sonoma County fromager brought several beautiful cheeses to sample, all made with goat milk from Redwood Hill Farm. Standouts were the semi-firm Tamar and the soft-ripened and grape-leaf wrapped Gefen.
Laura Chenel
Purveyors weren’t able to sell products at SF Cheese Fest, but that didn’t stop me from yelling, “Please take my money!” at many of the tables, including at reps for the OG of goat cheese, Sonoma’s Laura Chenel. The newest product there is a soft, spreadable pear, wine, and rosemary goat cheese, but I was yelling for an older product, a little tub of their firmer olive oil-marinated goat cheese with thyme.
Cypress Grove
Arcata’s Cypress Grove makes some of my favorite goat cheeses in California, like Truffle Tremor, Humboldt Fog and Purple Haze, so it was fun to try their newest, a Meyer lemon and honey edition. I’m no cheese pairing expert, but I think this would be incredible as part of a sweet or savory grazing board situation.
Marin French Cheese Co.
I ended up gravitating to a lot of goat cheese at the event, but my favorite cow’s milk cheese at the show by far was Prospector, a rich triple crème brie with truffles from Petaluma’s Marin French Cheese Co., the oldest cheese company in the country at a spry 165-years-old. Prospector offered such an awesome antidote to these particularly fake tasting truffle peanuts I had eaten a few days before.
Bohemian Creamery
I also really wanted to go home with Sebastopol’s Bohemian Creamery Heatwave, a seven-month aged goat cheese that’s coated in Mendocino-grown piment d’Espelette and then smoked. It’s the kind of cheese that you make tons of plans to use in different recipes, but then just eat the whole thing straight out of the package.
Nicasio Valley Cheese Co.
I’d pair Heatwave with the new Foggy Morning by Nicasio Valley Cheese Co. A soft goat cheese with a hint of jalapeño, it’d be perfect for poppers. Thank you to SF Cheese Fest for helping us all find some new favorites.
Tamara publishes the California Eating website, newsletter, and zine.
