by
Miriam Arkin

In November 2009, four of Murray’s finest (Mike, Frank, Jason and Nick) met with maître affineur Rodolphe le Meunier in the basement of David Bouley’s restaurant to try several of his cheeses. Floored by how delicious the things they were trying turned out to be, they quickly set about finding a way to import them. After several months of back and forth, they’re finally here. Though a small number have been available in Bouley’s restaurant, Murray’s will have an exclusive on several exceptional new cheeses.

Rodolphe le Meunier is based in Tours, a city on the Loire River two hours south-east of Paris. Though quite young, he has already been awarded two of the cheese world’s most distinguished prizes. In 2007 he won the “Meilleur Fromager International” prize at the Caseus championships, an international competition in which the world’s best compete in blind tastings, and rigorous cutting and displaying exercises. That same year he was named a “Meilleur Ouvrier de France,” a distinction only granted every four years by the French government in an effort to recognize and celebrate France’s most talented artisans. Not only is he able to source some of the most unusual, flavorful, and interesting cheeses being produced in France, he is also willing to use his immense skill as an affineur to alter them in unexpected and wonderful ways. Orthodox enough to insist that his Comté only be made of summer milk, he’s also radical enough to have created a highly organized and carefully arranged system of temperature and humidity controlled caves that bear little resemblance to the stone-walled variety. His blog, http://www.fromages-en-jazz.com, has some great pictures of Rodolphe and his caves.

Now, most importantly, the cheese!

His 2008 Comté d’Alpage is a revelation. The abundant and rich pasturage available high in the Alps during June, July, and August produces exceptionally vibrant milk for cheesemaking. The resulting Comté, aged nearly two years, is fruity, nutty, nuanced, slightly crunchy, and lingers endlessly on the palate.

Made by Trappist monks at the Abbey of Timadeuc in Bretagne (http://www.abbaye-timadeuc.fr/timadeuc_travail_fromagerie.html ) Timanoix is a small cylinder of pasteurized cow’s milk cheese that has been washed in walnut liqueur. The deep mahogany rind gives way to a nutty, leathery, earthen, sweet, spicy, bitter, and herbaceous cheese.

From the Auvergne, Rodolphe sources the earthy, cabbagy and entirely wonderful Fouchtra de Vache . It develops a seasonal and colorful assortment of molds in his caves, and arrives with a delicious custardy paste and crisp hint of minerality.

The Tomette Brebis Piments is a young sheep’s milk cheese that has a purée of Piments d’Espelette, an AOC paprika from the Basque country, mixed onto the paste and rubbed on the rind. It’s got a sweet lightly smoky flavor, even pliable paste, and completely unique aroma.

Finally, we’ll also have Beurre de Baratte, a real slow-churned butter made from cream sourced by Rodolphe. It might be the best butter we’ve ever had-thick, rich, and grassy as can be.

All of these new cheeses are available through Murray’s by Mail, Murray’s Bleecker and Grand Central. The butter can be found in our retail shops. Come take a taste!

by
Mike Anderson

Stop by the counter at Murray’s Cheese a couple of times – or talk to anyone who works here (or at any reputable cheese shop in the States, really) – and you’re bound to hear the reverently-spoken name: Pleasant Ridge Reserve. It may be the most universally well-regarded artisan cheese in the country, and with good cause. So what’s the fuss about?

Pleasant Ridge Reserve is made on the farm at Uplands Cheese Company in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Madison. The primary cheesemakers here are co-founder Mike Gingrich and relative newcomer Andy Hatch, and they turn out a product any farmstead cheesemaker would be proud of. I’m sure they have many secrets, but I’d imagine one reason it’s so exemplary is the simple fact that, for nearly a decade, nearly everything they’ve done is in service of this one cheese. All of their equipment & facilities, their time & effort, as well as the makeup of the herd & maintenance of the pastures are with one end result in mind: a perfect wheel of Pleasant Ridge.

It’s an Alpine-style raw cow’s milk cheese, in the same broad category as Beaufort, Comte, or Gruyere. The finest cheeses in these old-world styles come from cows that feed on what the French call alpage – a word for the fresh, bright & varied pasturage the cows get on Alpine slopes in the summer months. Knowing this fact, the folks at Uplands only produce this cheese when their cows are eating similarly tasty stuff on the gently rolling Wisconsin hills – from about May through October. Another smart decision was the size of wheel they chose: The 10-pounders they produce are notably faster-aging than their 80-pound predecessors. This means that, basically, you’ll get characteristics in a one-year wheel of Pleasant Ridge that you wouldn’t see until 18 months or more in a bigger wheel.

And speaking of one year, that’s really when we here at Murray’s think this cheese really shines – between about 12 and 15 months after it’s first made. Because of the limited production season (see above), cheese isn’t always available in this age window. But now that we’re getting into late spring/early summer, the wheels from the beginning of the 2009 season are finally coming of age. In fact, we just celebrated the 1-year birthday of our in-house batch of cheese. And why is this a big deal, you ask? Well, younger cheese is soft, sweet & slightly nutty; older cheese is caramelized, crunchy & leaning towards bittersweet. Right here in the period after one year of age, though, a near-perfect balance is struck. The richly floral aromatics of the spring milk really shine, and a deliciously toasty undercurrent runs throughout. And then, of course, there are the crystals…

SCIENCE KORNER
Crystals in Alpine-style cheese are the result of 2 processes during aging: protein breakdown & moisture loss. Anaerobic bacteria present in the cheese paste act to gradually break down milk proteins into their component parts, known as amino acids. (One of these, tyrosine, is of particular interest to us here, because it has limited solubility in water.) Simultaneously, as the cheese ages in the caves (either at Uplands or beneath Bleecker Street at Murray’s), it’s gradually losing water to the environment, which further concentrates & intensifies the flavors of the cheese. There comes a point in Pleasant Ridge’s life cycle, usually at about one year, where the moisture content is low enough & the free tyrosine is high enough for it to come out of solution. At this point, the tyrosine follows its natural propensity to clump together & form crystals, which you begin to see as tiny flecks of white on the cut surface of these cheeses, and which will increase in size over the next couple of months.

Cheese nerds (like myself) go apecrap for these crystals – they’re little crunchy bursts of flavor nestled in the middle of the cheese. In combination with the highly flavorful & aromatic profile the cheese has developed by this point, this is a sign of a well-aged cheese, and gives it a kind of ringing high note on the palate.

Pleasant Ridge will certainly change throughout the year, as well – as we move from spring through summer into fall, the character of the milk will progress accordingly. We’ll have slightly older cheese in the late fall, slightly younger cheese in the winter, but the care that Mike, Andy & the team at Uplands lavish on this cheese means it’ll always be fantastic. Still, though, I always look forward to this time in the spring, when the wheels on the shelves turn one year old for the first time of the season. Happy Birthday!

Brooklyn Brine & Mast Brothers

by
Grace Mitchell

We all know that a trip across the United States unabashedly presents the vapid landscape of cornfield upon cornfield, after soybean field upon soybean field, after cornfield upon cornfield…and much, much more of the same. The harvests of these uniform fields offer us the spectacular bounty of the supermarket via breakfast cereals, crackers, granola bars, fruit juice, peanut butter, gummy bears, ketchup…and nearly everything else caught within the fluorescent supermarket halls.

Thanks to investigative journalism that has emerged in recent years, we’re realizing that these sweeping expanses of dun-colored fields lie at the root of many of our health problems and dining discontent. With this growing awareness, as consumers we try to make more informed decisions.

But there’s the problem: while we may be growing aware of certain problems-others remain entirely out of our realm of consciousness. Consider, for example, the jar of pickles in the supermarket whose contents were gleaned from a vast ocean of cucumber fields in Wisconsin, or the chocolate bars filling the grocery store’s check-out line whose small percentage of cacao is masked by a list of unrecognizable ingredients.

Not only are the careless practices utilized by these industrial pickle producers and chocolate manufacturers damaging the land on which they grow, but this inferior crop cannot yield a product (pickle or morsel of chocolate) of peak deliciousness.

While certainly many have noticed the lacking deliciousness factor in our contemporary lives, few have made efforts to change this travesty-and especially to change it on a scale beyond personal.

Enter Murray’s, which takes pride in tracking down those people who have made it their prerogative to spread deliciousness across the land by selling their products at Murray’s locations. Handily, a couple of these makers are located in Brooklyn, namely, Shamus Jones of Brooklyn Brine and Rick and Michael Mast of Mast Brothers Chocolate.
In effort to ensure that its cheesemongers have comprehensive knowledge reaching beyond that of cheese, Murray’s Vice President Liz Thorpe hosted a “Meet the Makers” event at her Brooklyn flat this past weekend. Not only did the event offer a venue for tasting the products, but, more importantly, it provided education and opened discussion surrounding the products Murray’s carries.

Shamus’ pickles stand a far cry from the jars of rubbery cucumbers found in grocery stores across the country. After years working in vegetarian kitchens in Seattle, he developed a penchant for pickling the ephemeral bounty of the narrow Pacific Northwest summers-from fiddleheads and garlic scapes, to chanterelles come autumn. Upon returning to his native Brooklyn, Shamus continued to pickle, and in July of 2009 he picked up production and started commercially jarring his pickles – carrots

, squash, beets, asparagus, and so forth. Sourcing his organic vegetables from the Northeast, Shamus explains that not only does this decision result in better quality and better tasting pickles, but it also makes more sense as a business model.

A business model which, as a liberal arts school graduate, Shamus is still fine-tuning. He and his team of three employees receive their vegetables and pull all-nighters peeling and processing vegetables, then pickle the vegetables in four gallon batches of brine (brines vary according to vegetable), and hand-measure all of the spices in each jar of pickles. Contrary to most other pickle varieties available, Shamus pickles only seasonal vegetables, avoids white vinegar in favor of more flavorful vinegars, and uses evaporated cane sugar in the stead of corn syrup.

Because Shamus only pickles vegetables that are in season, here at Murray’s we’re eagerly waiting for the imminent arrival of Brooklyn Brine’s asparagus and lavender pickles-and looking forward to their red pepper with orange and saffron pickles later in the summer. We’re also lucky enough to be the only carrier of Brooklyn Brine Serrano Beans, which, as a vegetable that Brooklyn Brine pickled in smaller quantity, cannot supply larger retailers.

Like Shamus’ pickles, the chocolate produced by the Mast Brothers is made with similar care and conscientiousness. On Saturday evening, Michael revealed that the Mast Brothers, too, began with a background in professional kitchens-and then a discovery that nobody in New York made chocolate from scratch. Certainly many makers manufacture chocolate in the city, but nowhere are the beans sourced, hand-sorted, roasted, and crafted into chocolate bars.

Understanding that the final quality of their chocolate bars directly correlates to the raw materials used, Rick and Michael source the best available ingredients. Saturday evening, Michael explained that most cacao comes from a high-yield, disease resistant variety of cacao bean whose origins from plants grown in inhospitable sun-soaked fields do not bode well for the health of the environment, the working conditions of the cacao harvesters, the quality of the beans, and ultimately the taste of that chocolate bar. Alternatively, the Masts work directly with farmers and select less common varieties of cacao. Not only does the utilization of less common varieties yield more nuanced flavors in their chocolate bars, but their production of single-origin bars highlights the diversity of beans sourced from countries such as Madagascar, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. After sorting their beans, the Masts roast them at different temperatures for varying amounts of time in effort to discover which combinations yield the best chocolate bar. Their care extends beyond the cacao beans they use: the almonds are sourced from a family farm in California and then roasted them in their Brooklyn factory, the espresso beans are sourced from the conscientious folks at Stumptown Coffee, and they make sure to leave out any extraneous ingredients such as soy lecithin or vanilla which tend to drown out the flavor of the cacao.

Stop by Murray’s and pick up the latest deliciousness from Brooklyn Brine and the Mast Brothers. These goods won’t linger long at Murray’s…and you’ll have to wait till next spring before that asparagus returns!