"blue cheese" news and stories

Impress your next date with this killer steak-and-salad recipe from Kitchen Daily expert Tyler Florence. He's serving up a seared beef tenderloin alongside a crisp wedge of romaine smothered in a creamy bacon and blue cheese dressing. It's half the price of a steakhouse meal -- but it packs twice the flavor.

Get Tyler's recipe for Steak and Bacon Blue Cheese Wedge Salad.

Summer's a great time to pull out the chips and dips when entertaining. Here are three easy ideas that wil work with either Greek-style yogurt or sour cream

Never judge a cheese solely on its smell? An in-depth breakdown of Strathdon Blue's flavor profile reveals a series of gustatory impressions, ranging from earthy and spicy to rich and sweet. Blues are often misconceived as pungent, and even putrid. However, slowly savoring a bite of Strathdon Blue, from cheesemaker Ruaraidh (pronounced "Rory") Stone in the region of Tain in Northern Scotland, we discovered a mild peppery taste with a lusciously creamy texture.

Usually, when they introduce the secret ingredient on Iron Chef America, we can fool ourselves into thinking the contestants really have no idea what they're about to see. The music, the flashing lights, the screaming from The Chairman -- it all overwhelms the fact that the two chefs who are challenged to make five courses out of this stuff look, well, shockingly unshocked.

Never was that more apparent than this week. When the lids came off the trays and the no-longer-new-to-this-Iron-Chef-thing champ Jose Garces and fresh-faced challenger Kelly Liken were presented with mounds and mounds of stinky blue cheese, they didn't so much as blink. Hell, Garces didn't even look up at the chairman. When Liken unnaturally leaned in and started petting some of the cheese wedges (?!), the gig was up. This, clearly, was not an ingredient that was "new" to them.

The recipes reflected as much. Liken's stock-in-trade in Vail, Colo. tends toward local/regional cuisine, and her recipes were for the most part sophisticated and well thought-out -- except for that final fruit crisp that substituted a blue-cheese layer for butter, just under the crumb topping. Kudos for ingenuity, but -- ew!

No cheese better captures both the earthy, nutty taste of cheddar and the piquant kick of a blue cheese like Dunbarton Blue from Roelli Cheese Company in Shullsburg, Wis. This cheese hybrid is not the result of mere coincidence. It's the brilliant effect of ever so carefully applying several different cheese-making techniques – "cheddaring," piercing the cheese and above all cave-aging the cheese. To find out more about how all these procedures create Dunbarton Blue, we spoke to its creator, Chris Roelli.

"I set out to create a young to medium aged farmstead cheddar with a hint of blue," explains Roelli. To achieve this goal, he begins with collecting high-quality fresh milk from a single dairy. According to Roelli, selecting the milk is one of the most important parts of the cheese making process. The blue veins are created by introducing blue mold spores to the already flavorful milk. But, that's not the only way blue is added to the cheese.