"ny cheese" news and stories

The mere thought of blue cheese evokes a surge of flavor memories -- sweet caramel, piquant peppers and earthy aromas. Favorites such as Gorgonzola Piccante, Rogue River Blue, Fourme d'Ambert and Vaquero all come to mind. But Cayuga Blue from Lively Run Goat Dairy eschews the standard flavor profile of a blue cheese. Instead, it's downright subdued with an herbaceous grassy taste reminiscent of a goat's milk tomme-style cheese, similar to Twig Farm's Goat Tomme.

The blue veins interestingly seem to function as a slightly spicy "topping" to this already flavorful cheese. The delicate goat's milk comes across first before you're hit with the mild tang of blue molds. Aged for two months, the cheese develops a firm dry texture that becomes soft and velvety on the palate. Altogether, it makes for a subtle blue, toned down with a rich, creamy taste.

At the Lively Run Goat Farm in the Finger Lakes region of New York, meticulous care of the several different goat breeds (Alpine, Nubian, Saanen and South African Boer breeds, and even crossbreeds) results in the flavorful aromatic raw milk used to create the cheese. In addition to the milk from her own farm, Susanne Messmer mixes goat's milk from five other sustainable farms in the area with hers to produce Cayuga Blue.

Pressed onto a baguette, crumbled over salads, or eaten straight, we can't get enough of goat cheese in springtime.

This year, voluptuaries and gastronomes seeking a decadently rich and creamy goat's milk cheese will go wild for Rainbeau Ridge Farm's Mont Vivant. Unlike other mold-ripened goat's milk cheeses (like Selles sur Cher or Valençay), this offering from Bedford Hills, NY has an exquisite bloomy rind (unusual in goat's milk cheeses) that seems to impart a more complex and cakey texture, as if it were a cross between Valençay and Brie.