In 10 minutes this morning, our online registration for Open House New York cave tours was completely full. We apologize if we missed you this time around! Please fill out this quick survey so we can keep you posted on our year-round cheese-filled events, and click here to check out our full calendar of classes at Murray’s.

Here at Murray’s headquarters, we do a lot more than sell cheese. We teach classes about cheese, we age cheese, we make t-shirts about cheese, we devise the perfect pairings for cheese, we write about cheese….and the newest piece of writing comes from our own Rob Kaufelt. He put a spin on Renard the Fox, the 13th century French text that was translated in 1983 by Patricia Terry.

To set the scene: Renard has been injured by a trap and is attempting to eat Tiecelin the crow.

The crow uttered a mighty screech,
Attempting to get his voice to reach
Still higher, but the claw that gripped
The cheese relaxed, the treasure slipped.
It fell to the ground at renard’s feet,
But he, that master of deceit
Woe to the one he takes for prey!
Just simply left it where it lay,
Hoping, by this joy deferred,
That he’d also get to eat the bird.
The cheese in plain sight on the gound,
Renard the fox staggers around,
One foot behind the other drags,
His skin hangs off like tattered rags.
(although he’d only recently managed
to flee the trap, his leg was damaged).
All this for tiecelin’s benefit:
‘Alas, he says, ‘that god sees fit
To afflict poor me with miseries,
By saint mary, i swear that cheese
(God’s curse on it!), it smells so strong
Will do me in in before too long.
For everyone i know agrees
There’s nothing as bad for wounds as cheese.
It’s strictly forbidden in my diet;
I haven’t the least desire to try it.
I beg you, tiecelin, come down here.
If you don’t help, my end is near!’

Tiecelin takes pity on him, but realizes his mistake in getting too close, losing four feathers. he chides renard for his deceitful acting, and annoyed, tells him the cheese is all he’ll get that day.

Renard didn’t bother to insist,
He was busy making up for what he’d missed.
By eating the cheese to the very last bit
(but there wasn’t very much of it);
The way it went down would make you think
It was some kind of delicious drink.
You could look in any land you please
And never would you find such cheese;
He’d eaten cheese his whole life long
And certainly he could not be wrong.
So did renard add up the score,
And his injured leg did hurt no more.

Revised by Rob Kaufelt. Photo courtesy of reynaerts.be

Earlier this year, Murray’s own Liz Thorpe was called on by Cooking Light as a regional food expert for their annual Taste Test Awards.  We’re excited to grab this months’ issue to read about some of the country’s finest artisanal food producers, including a handful of our favorites! (Check out the producers featured including Cellars at Jasper Hill Farm, Salumeria Biellese, Effie’s Homemade, McClure’s, Early Bird Granola, Boccalone Nduja).  From Murray’s Cheese headquarters here in New York City, Liz contributed her thoughts on regionality and seasonality in our corner of the country…


Growing up in Connecticut, the passage of time was marked by the changing spread on my family’s rickety wood table. Spring officially arrived when I could pluck transparent lettuces from the garden, heavy with clumps of wet soil. Summer vacation to Maine was marked just over the New Hampshire border, with an inaugural lobster dripping a river of melted butter down the wrist. To this day, my husband claims I’ve made him love cold weather if only for that first heritage pork loin, capped with a snowy layer of fat and roasted atop a mash of earthen carrots and rosemary boughs. Homemade sundaes in January still require no more than a fist of clean snow and a drizzle of hot maple syrup.

In my current home of Brooklyn, in my job working with artisan food makers, the Northeast has come to symbolize that inimitable crossroads of urban and rural, with fantastically diverse and adventurous city palates that support local producers who vein map-like from Washington D.C., New York and Boston. The resurgence of hand-made foods is fuelled, both in its production and consumption, by a young generation of back-to-the-landers celebrating flavor, tradition, and seasonality. Some of these makers are bringing the beer brewing, vegetable pickling, honey hives, and charcuterie curing into the cellars and onto the roofs of urban enclaves, beginning an entirely new dialogue with their country brethren.
 

What transcends origin is a continual and growing awareness of fleeting availability. The Northeast yields the raw ingredients for so much, but not all the time, and not to a consistently flavorful degree. What we’re perfecting is preservation, where possible, and abundant celebration where not.

We’re kicking off our Meet the Makers tour tonight in Atlanta!  Meet cheese pioneer Allison Hooper of the Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery and taste her award-winning Bonne Bouche and Coupole.  Allison will be at the Edgewood Store on Caroline Street from 4-8pm. 

Come meet the makers at Murray’s and take a taste of some of our favorite products!  For the next four weekends in Atlanta, food producers from Savannah to Switzerland will be sharing their techniques and stories behind their products.  Learn how generations-old recipes shape the Creminelli sausages crafted in Utah, Z Crackers get their crunch in New York, and delicious goats’ milk is hand-crafted into cheese and flavored with honey, pimento and other ingredients by Belle Chevre in Alabama.  Come by and take a taste today.  Stay tuned to find Murray’s around town next month when we’ll be partnering with Cook’s Warehouse on October 5 and Sweetwater Brewery on October 7. 

Tastings are at our stores in Alpharetta, Sandy Springs and Edgewood - see the detailed schedule below.

About the Makers:

• The gold standard for artisanal honey, Savannah Bee Company’s Tupelo Honey and Honeycomb are sure to turn up the charm of any cheese plate.
• La Bonne Vie’s mini brie is not only the perfect size, it’s a buttery and mild go-to for all of your entertaining needs.
• Oregon’s famed extra-sharp cheddar comes from Tillamook, a farmer-owned dairy cooperative that’s been around for a century. 
• Emmi will bring your taste buds to Switzerland with selections like sweet and nutty Emmenthaler and aged Gruyere.
• Favorites from Sommerdale include the intense Cotswold, with traces of onion and chive, and an Irish cheddar that’s grassy and sharp.
• Creminelli Fine Meats have been hand-crafting meats for generations with their family recipes, and their salamis and sopressata are bursting with flavor. 
• Made in New York and cut by hand, Z Crackers stand up to your favorite toppings with varieties like garlic & basil and red onion & rosemary.
• Roth Kase’s Grand Cru Gruyere and Swiss cheeses are tasty traditional European recipes made by Wisconsin cheesemakers.
• Sweet Grass Dairy, a local favorite from Thomasville, churns out delicious cow and goats milk cheeses like Green Hill, a Camembert-style rich and buttery star.
• Belle Chevre’s selection of flavored artisan goat cheeses made in Alabama are sure to impress – varieties include honey, pimento, and Southern Belle, dressed with bourbon pecans.
• Reypenaer’s aged goudas have been made by the van den Wijngaard family just south of Amsterdam for generations – they’re snackable, complex and delicious. 

Meet the Makers Schedule: Fridays from 4-8pm and Saturdays and Sundays from 1-5pm

by
Miriam Arkin

Here at Murray’s we find that the coming of fall (heralding all the delicious things that can be pulled from the ground, cut from the vine, and thrown into a pot) is the perfect time to pay homage to a bounteous cheese, Parmigiano-Reggiano.  We’ve stacked big golden wheels all over the store, and even split a few open—all the better to see how the two-inch thick rind gives way to a perfectly grainy texture.  But don’t be too quick to look beyond the rind!  It too has become an Italian staple, used to flavor soups and stews, and given to infants as what must be the world’s best teething companion.  Italians produce about 3 million wheels of Parmigiano annually, of which only 16% is exported abroad.  Interestingly, whether it is consumed domestically or exported, every single wheel of Parmigiano is inspected for quality by a member of an organization whose very existence seems like an ornate American fantasy—the Consorzio Parmigiano-Reggiano, whose responsibility it is to test and grade every single wheel of Parmigiano made in Italy.  Why care?  At the heart of the Consorzio are its inspectors, masters of cheese whose wise judgments guarantee quality even as production of Parmigiano increases every year.

Parmigiano-Reggiano is made on farms in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna left of the river Reno and Mantua right of the river Po.  Cheesemaking follows a careful pattern: the evening’s milking is set aside overnight, allowing the cream to rise.  The following morning, the cream is skimmed off the top, and the skimmed milk is then combined with that morning’s whole milk in bell-shaped copper cauldrons.  The milk is heated and rennet is added to curdle the milk.  After a few minutes, the fresh curd cut with a long bladed tool called spino into rice sized grains.  It is then heated again, allowed to cool, and removed from the copper vat with a cheese cloth, yielding about two wheels worth of cheese.  Once these wheels have spent 25 days in a salt water bath, they are set in special temperature and humidity controlled rooms where they age for at least 12 months.

After a year of aging, the Consorzio steps in, sending inspectors out to test every single wheel.  This is a feat in and of itself, but more fascinating still is how the inspections are carried out.  Instead of using a cheese iron (the long tubular beak used to reach the middle of cheeses) to take samples, the inspectors use them to gently tap along the exterior of the cheese.  They are able to listen for sounds that indicate cracks, voids, or other undesirable faults in the cheese.  That’s right, listen for them.  Based on their determinations, the 80lb wheels of cheese are seared with one of two large and clearly defined oval brands—“Parmigiano-Reggiano” for top quality cheese that can continue aging, and “Parmigiano-Reggiano Mezzano” for lesser quality cheese that should be consumed young.  These lesser wheels are further branded with broad parallel lines, making it impossible to sell them as their worthier cousins.  If a wheel doesn’t meet the requirements to be called Parmigiano-Reggiano the smaller dotted inscription applied at the time the cheese was made is scraped entirely off the cheese, so it cannot be sold as the real thing.  After 18 months of aging, cheesemakers can have a Consorzio inspector come back to determine whether cheese can be further categorized as “export” or “extra” quality.  Export quality gets shipped around the world, extra quality is set aside to age for longer than the traditional 24 months, producing a dryer and more intense cheese.

We’ll be celebrating this auditory genius all month, and we’ve got enough wheels of export quality Parmigiano to circle the store, so please do come in for a taste.