Anerican Cheese Society Annual COnference

Hello from Burlington Vermont!

I am here for a week of total cheese immersion. What a nice break from reality! Luckily I have brief access to the web and I hope to bring you some updates for those of you who are interested in cheese.

We went on a farmstead tour this morning. We visited the Woodstock Water Buffalo Dairy, one of only 2 in the US. What an entusiastic bunch of people! Interesting fact: water buffalo was introduced to America for weed control in Florida. There is more waterbuffalo cheese produced in the world than goat and sheep cheese combined. WB cheese is hi in antioxydants, hormone-free, has more calcium, more protein and less cholesterol than cow's milk. There are many reasons to support this industry, but the main reason is of course, it produced the best dairy! We sampled some yoghurt - available in many health food stores, and the pasta filata. Both excellent products.

We followed with a visit to the Neighbourly Farm Dairy, anorganic dairy which produces cheddar - excellent product, incredibly clean finish - and an awesome feta. Not the creamy sheep feta which is traditional, this one is more chewy (cow's milk), but delicious.

That's it for now. Gotta run to the "Meet the Cheesemakers" session.

Met Sid Cook this morning. lovely man! Hope to connect with him later.

A bientot!

A

This week has been filled with fascinating information to go along with fabulous cheese. We had a discussion yesterday about raw milk cheeses - no controversy there! We were comparing the European perspective and theAmerican position.

Apparently, the FDA has changed its definition of pasteurization to accomodate irratiation as a safe means of destroying pathogens. But this opens the door to other techniques which I suspect they never considered when they changed the rules. Such as, you got, aging. Currently, 60 days is the requirement for retailing raw milk products. This is considered to be sufficient time to allow milk cultures to overcome most pathogens. There is some controversy over this, listeria and other pathogens can still get through, but that goes for pasteurized milk too. I'm no scientist, and I apologize to those who know better, there's a good chance I'm misinterpreting much of the technical info that was presented. Suffice it to say, the FDA thing is huge.

In France, there's also controversy surrounding the raw milk requirement of PDO cheeses. Lactalis and Issigny want the PDO rules to drop raw milk as a requirement for Camembert, mainly because they are big businesses who want to take their Camembert - as a PDO preferably - to the US. They are prepared to drop PDO status in order to use pasteurized milk. What a loss... Smaller PDO Camembert producers are firmly attached to the raw requirment and are pushing to use science to support the fact that with hygenic improvements in the dairy industry, there is no safety differences btw raw and pasteurized. On the other hand, much research is going into the development of a milk culture that could actually neutralize pathogens should they make their way into the unpasteurized cheese. Just when we thought we knew where we stood on the debate, lots of new juicy info comes in, and renews our interest in this all too important issue.

Tonight is the Festival of cheese. Over 1200 cheeses submitted for competition will be available for sampling. I skipped lunch!

The grand winner for best of show this year was Leelanau Cheese for their aged Raclette.The 2nd runner up was Beecher's Handmade Cheese for Flagship Reserve ( the same guys who made beer for many years - they're standing at the computer station right next to me...), and the 3rd runner up was Roth Kase USA for Roth's Private Reserve. Congratulations to our friend Sid Cook who won a great many awards - I will list them later when I have the list in front of me.