Cheeseplates

Cork -- just trust your waiter

I don't know if I was being lazy, or adventurous, but when saw the cheese menu at Cork, I decided to just ask the waiter to pick three for me. Maybe I was thinking that a place mostly dedicated to wine would probably take their cheese seriously too.  Or maybe I was owning up to the reality that, in the absence of descriptive blurbs, I have no idea which cheese is which on a menu featuring mostly artisanal US dairy farms. Regardless, I opted for the "would you just pick three for me?  I tend to prefer stinky cheeses" approach.

And it paid off!  He came back with:

• Humboldt Fog: a creamy ripened goat's milk cheese that looks like morbier (with the line of ash in the center), but melts on the tongue faster and has more tang than animal flavor;
• Manchego: a reliable flavorful standby that holds up well to strong cheeses (and is generally loved by everyone if you are sharing with someone who doesn't like stinky cheese); and
• "Red Hawk" from Cowgirl Creamery: a triple cream, washed rind, cows milk cheese that has that great "this definitely can from a farm with hay and animals" kind of flavor. I loved it.

The plate came with mixed nuts, fruit bread, and what appeared to be a smear of grape jelly, but was probably currant or something else more dignified. Definitely a place I will go back to for more cheese.  Throw in a glass or two from their extensive wine list, and you've got an excellent evening.

Commonwealth Gastropub

Ok, so technically it was a ploughman's lunch platter that we ordered at Commonwealth gastro pub,(with meats, cheeses, and pickles) but it was tasty and meets my formal criteria of being more than one kind of cheese on a plate with accoutrement. Stilton and some kind of herbed cheddar, to be exact.  Frankly, I thought the herbed cheddar was kind of gross, but the stilton was good. It came with pickle, apple, cabbage, prosciutto, and dollops of mustard and date paste, which made for a solid lunch with  pint of lager.  I'd say it's more for the british-pub-philes and less the cheese lovers, but since they never advertised it as a 'cheese plate' per-se, I can't really complain.

Proof Redux

My husband's folks were in town this week and volunteered to watch the baby so we could go to dinner together.  After much deliberation, we decided to go back to Proof so I could actually enjoy the wine and cheese (as an aside, the food and atmosphere are great too).  They have a solid cheese menu, including brief descriptions of each one (ie: "firm, tangy, complex").  After a pregnancy-prompted hiatus from the pasteurized cheeses I love, I went strait for the blues and those that sounded "stinky." This produced:

• Red Hawk: a mostly soft cow's milk cheese, which did have that barn-yardy flavor that people label "stinky," (the menu actually described it this way) but the cheese taste itself was on the thin side -- not quite creamy enough to make the flavor sort of go up your nose the way those kinds of cheeses can;
• Garrotxa: a semi-firm sheep's milk cheese labeled "herbacaous," which apparently means "nice, sound, cheeseplate cheese with enough flavor to be interesting, but not enough to put people off"; and
• Gorgonzola Dolce: an Italian blue, that I really loved.  Blue cheese can poke you in the mouth and overwhelm other things on the plate, but this one was smooth and creamy and had an almost sugary ending on it.  

They served it with raw honey, rum soaked rasins, peach puree, and fig/pine nut bread, which made for a really sweet cheese plate (so if you like dessert to be sweet, but want cheese, this is a nice compromise).  The waiter offered to pair it with a desert wine for me, and in retrospect I should have taken him up on it.  Definitely next time.

Proof -- that beer goes well with cheese

We had the six course tasting menu at Proof last night (every bit delicious by the way) with two of the three of us agreeing to the course by course wine pairing as well. When the cheese course arrived however, they paired it with a Belgian style white ale (a Foret for those of you interested). 

Now I for one can't stand Belgian white beers.  Upon my first introduction to Hoegaarden in grad school, someone had the unfortunate precision to assert that "this beer tastes like dirty socks," and I just couldn't drink it after that. Regardless, I was delighted to find that a restaurant respected for its wine and cheese had put forward a beer pairing! While wine is the go to beverage for cheese, I think it can really cover up some of the beautiful cheese aftertaste or alter the initial flavor of a cheese hitting your mouth.  Not beer -- beer is mellow and it doesn't mind playing second fiddle to an awesome wedge of cheese. My friend tells me this is becoming a trend (beer-cheese pairings), which is certainly fine by me!

The cheese course at proof included a rather calm Gorgonzola and a robust sheep/cow hard cheese called Mona.  The latter was nutty and delicious with the raw honey served along side.

P.S. Apologies that my cheese plate consumption took such a nose dive over the last few months. The whole pregnancy=no unpasteurized cheese thing kind of takes the magic out of ordering whim-motivated cheese place and seeing what turns up. 

Zola (kitchen lends a hand)

Ok, so one of the 8 million things that pregnant women are supposed to avoid is unpasteurized cheese.  Luckily, the US government has such stringent pasteurization laws that any cheese produced on an industrial scale is totally fine.  Problem is, most restaurants rely on delicious boutique cheeses to concoct their cheese plate. What is a pregnant cheese lover to do??

Happily, Zola is also willing to poke around in their cheese pantry and pull together a pasteurized only cheese plate if you ask them to. They made no promises on the pairing, but when it arrived, it was just fine.  An aged goat, something kind of like manchego, and what may have been an Irish cheddar. Frankly, it would have been great with a beer, now that I think about it.  A handful of fruity goos to pair with it (maybe quince?  nothing was labeled or explained) and I couldn't complain.  Ok, I could complain since I had no idea what any of the cheeses actually were, but since their kitchen had taken the time to find the wrappers and determine which cheeses were pasteurized, I thought I'd let it go.

Bar Pilar

With our valiant New year's eve efforts to go ice-skating foiled, four of us found ourselves munching a cheese and meat plate from the choose-your-own-assortment at Bar Pillar. We went with:

• a Camembert
• a Mimolette, and
• an Irish-style Cheddar 

Somehow I am always surprised that Mimolette is an orange cheese.  Subconsciously, I suspect that I associate orange cheese with American kraft singles, and Mimolette just sounds so French.  It turns out, this was a cheese commissioned by Louis XIV, who wanted a cheese similar to Edam, but to make it sufficiently different, had it colored orange (see wikipedia if you don't believe me).  This cracks me up. In any case, it pairs nicely with Irish style cheddar (it has a very clean cheesy taste), and the plate at Bar Pillar had some sound accompaniments (french mustard, quince, etc).  As aways, I like the fact that you can build your own from the menu, even if they were light on descriptions.

1789 - kind of fuddy duddy

I had never eaten at 1789 before, but given its reputation, I looked forward to the cheese plate there with great enthusiasm.  Jessica even told me in advance "they have a cheeseplate -- I checked."

Maybe my expectations were too high, but in the end, it was just sort of OK. The cheeses were fine (and they were all from the Cowgirl Creamery, a veritable cheese heaven smack in the middle downtown DC)-- but, frankly, they were kind of boring as a set.

• Goat Tomme
• Sally Jackson Sheep
• Grayson
• Chappelle
• Point Reyes Farmstead Blue

I guess that on a plate of five cheeses, I want one adventurous stinky affair, and this plate was more a collection of "best supporting actors."  On the upside, it did come with a smear of some red fruit compote that tasted, for better or for worse, like red fruit roll-ups.

PS7's - a friendly adventure in cheese-platery

We went to PS7's for summer restaurant week, but I couldn't stop myself from ordering the cheeseplate off of the regular menu. I'm glad I did too, because it is probably the most friendly, well constructed cheeseplate I've had in DC.  A nice set of flavorful, non-stinky cheeses with a full festival of accompaniments.

PS7's has a 6 cheese menu that you can select from, but all are quite mild -- this is why I say its friendly.  There is some nice cheese flavor, but nothing that frightens away your less cheese adventurous friends. I chose:

• Dante -- a hard sheep's milk cheese.  If you like Parmesan, you'll like this although the flavor is a bit more cheesy, less salty.
• Cocoa Cardona -- my favorite - a slightly less hard goat's milk cheese whose rind has been rubbed in unsweetened cocoa powder. A different combination, but nothing unfamiliar. 
• Shepherd's blend -- a firm, cow's, sheep's, and goat's milk cheese that was very mellow.

They came with dried cherries, preserved figs, pear compote, quince paste, apple slices, almonds AND sesame crackers. 

While none of the individual cheeses blew me away, PS7's is the place to go if you are looking for a way to introduce a skeptic to why a well made cheeseplate is a beautiful thing: friendly cheeses; a written menu to choose from; nice, non intimidating wait staff; and so many accompaniments that it becomes obvious how different a cheese tastes when paired with different morsels. 

Vidalia -- hands down the best

Vidalia is officially the home of my new favorite cheese plate. What you can see in the photo, is that they served three lovely cheeses with two (count them, two) fruity accompaniments.  What you can't see is that there is actually an entire cheese menu, on paper and available for the studying -- thus enabling one to tailor a plate of fromage exactly to the moment's taste.  I, for example felt like a creamy but strong flavored trio would be the perfect end to a birthday dinner - oh and it was. Seriously -- absolutely delicious! The plate included:

• Laguiole Vieux: a semi-hard raw cows milk cheese that had good flavor, but you could also share it with people that don't care for stinky cheese.
• Robiola Fia: a runny Italian goats milk cheese that tastes very earthy, particularly if you eat the rind -- which is about the consistency of a thick brie rind and has been aged in a fig leaf for extra pungency.
• Petit Livarot: a firm but oh-so-creamy cows milk cheese that is not for the faint of heart.  If some cheeses are a bit barnyardy, this one is more reminiscent of the barn itself. I LOVED it.

Along side these lovely specimens lay a sweep of cherry preserves and a little dollop of rhubarb compote; thick baked crackers provided an appropriately bland carbohydrate base. Honestly, nothing could have made this cheese plate better.

I think what I liked best though, was that you could take your time and think about what cheeses you wanted without anyone standing there holding a cheese knife.  If you take your cheese personally, a cheese cart can be a mixed blessing.  Yes, there's variety, but there is also a time-constraint in that you have to chose while the fromager is standing there.  Also, you can't get up next to the cheeses and smell them -- which is frankly a much better way of knowing what they'll taste like than listening to someone explain 10 cheeses to you.  But a menu doesn't tap its foot, the descriptions are apt, and the service at Vidalia is leisurely paced so that there is time to think it through.  Two thumbs up!

You can see a version of the Vidalia cheese menu here. Its out of date, so the specific cheeses actually available will vary, but the selection is indicative of what I found.  yum.

The lot of fruit and one kind of cheese plate at Jack's

Memorial day weekend dawned with great plans of kayaking, but one sick friend, an Ikea incident, and 24 hours later, we found it hard to resist a suggestion that we just occupy the out door seating at a neighborhood bar all afternoon instead. Thus, 3pm found four of us at Jack's (on 17th st) talking  the very nice waiter into making a "meat and cheese plate" into a "just cheese plate."  Vince said "throw in some fruit" and  the waiter disappeared into the kitchen.

He returned with what was probably the best fruit plate I have seen in a long, long time: grapes, strawberries, orange, melon, kiwi, pineapple -- and 4 lonely slices of Brie.  We devoured it. In 20 min the 4 tables around us had each ordered one as well (bear in mind this isn't on the menu).

So if you happen by Jack's go ahead and ask for the fruit and cheese plate -- tell them you read about it online.  Its pretty sucky from a cheese perspective, but it was absolutely perfect for a mildly inebriated, humid, Sunday afternoon.