The photo of Four Cheese Potato Gratin that caught my eye at Evil Shenanigans.
I kid you not. A week after I made Four Cheese Potato Gratin as a side for a holiday dinner, I dreamt of the wonderful aroma of four cheeses melting in warm milk. Even now, when I close my eyes and inhale, it’s as if I were standing in front of the open oven.
There is no better smell to warm the heart on a winter day.
I picked the recipe described by Kelly Jaggers in her blog Evil Shenanigans because of the mouth-watering photos she published. That’s her gratin above. Mine appears below.
The Four Cheese Potato Gratin as it came out of my oven.
Instead of just any parmesan, I went with the real deal, Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy.
The only thing I’d do different the next time is add a pinch of salt and pepper between layers and use more cheese than the recipe suggests, say, four cups total instead of three.
Riopelle de l’Isle: A world-class triple-cream—made in Canada.
I enjoy eating cheese from around the world but my passion is for fromages fins, artisan cheese made in Canada. When I hear someone praising an imported cheese to high heaven, my immediate reaction is: What do Canadian cheesemakers produce that is just as tasty, if not superior?
Call me chauvinistic, but I’d rather go with Riopelle de l’Isle, the first triple-cream artisanal cheese produced in Canada. It was launched in 2001 by Société Coopérative Agricole de l’Île-aux-Grues, located on an island in the St. Lawrence River northeast of Québec City, and quickly became a huge success.
A wedge of Riopelle reveals a creamy and incredibly smooth centre beneath a thin, bloomy rind. Leaving an exquisite hint of butter, it is absolutely enchanting.
Named for Jean-Paul Riopelle, a world-renowned Canadian artist.
Jean-Paul Riopelle, the world-renowned painter who spent the last years of his life on l’Île-aux-Grues, gave his name and the image of one of his best-known paintings to the cheese. In return, part of the profits financially help students of the island who wish to attend high school or university.
Laliberté: a triple-cream created by award-winning chessemaker Jean Morin.
If there were no Riopelle to be had, I’d select a another Québec beauty, this one created by Jean Morin at Fromagerie du Presbytère in Sainte-Élizabeth de Warwick, Québec:
Laliberté, a triple-cream cheese made with whole organic cow’s milk from the family dairy farm across the road from the creamery. It’s such a rich dairy delight!
Given the critical and commercial success of Riopelle over the last decade, Canadian producers of cheese on an industrial scale now also offer triple-creams:
The factory cheeses are OK, if you can get past the modified milk ingredients used in their manufacture, but the artisanal producers who use pure milk are the ones who deserve and need the support of Canadian cheese lovers.
Especially with recent rumblings from Ottawa that Canada’s producers of artisan cheeses may face greater challenges in the future. A report in the Ottawa Citizen indicates the Canadian government and European Union are close to a deal that would see a substantial increase in exports of European dairy products—mainly cheese—to Canada in exchange for greater access to European customers for Canadian beef, pork and canola.
Brown eggs give Jāņu siers a yellowish look. The cheese is eaten sliced, with butter.
The sweet smell of dairy in the house that comes from making cheese at home is one of my favourite things at Christmas. Holding milk at 90 to 95C for 15 minutes so curd separates from whey is a sure way to create that warm and wonderful aroma.
Every December, the winter solstice finds me in the kitchen, happily making a midsummer cheese, a caraway-speckled pressed fresh cheese called Jāņu siers in Latvian, my native language.
In Latvia, the cheese is a core ingredient in celebrations marking the summer solstice, a festival called Jāņi. I like the cheese too much to eat it only once a year, thus, the tradition of making it at midwinter and giving small wheels as gifts to family and friends at Christmas.
Here’s what I posted about the cheese on St. John’s Day a few years back:
“Jāņu siers, what kind of cheese is that?” you ask. It’s a caraway-speckled fresh cheese that I make at home.
Jāņu siers in Latvian, my native language, is, literally, John’s cheese in English. When I want to sound fancy, I call it Midsummer’s Night.
In Latvia, for more than a thousand years, it has been made at the summer solstice to mark the midsummer festival of Jani. That festival was celebrated last night by Latvians all over the world on the eve of St. John’s Day. For many, it’s the most important holiday of the year.
In Latvia, farms are bedecked with garlands of oak and birch branches and meadow flowers. Nearly everyone leaves the city for the open air so that the shortest night of the year can be spent in the merry company of friends in the country. Bonfires are lit, special songs are sung, dancing is a universal element during the festival. The traditional caraway-seed cheese and lots of beer are on the menu.
Tradition has it that this is the one night of the year that you must never sleep. Girls pick meadow flowers to make wreaths for their hair, while men named Jānis get a bushy crown of oak leaves around their heads. (Jānis is the most popular male name in Latvia and comparable to John.) Eating, singing, drinking and dancing ensue the whole night long. Although the sun sets briefly, it doesn’t get dark in the higher latitude of Latvia and everyone must be awake to greet the rising sun in the morning. A naked romp into the nearest lake or river is a must for men—and the women who cheer them on. Young couples like to go into the forest and search for the legendary fern blossom. Or so they say. And when you greet the morning sun, you have to wash your face in the grass’s morning dew, which on Jāņi morning is said to have particularly beneficial properties.
Jāņu siers is always eaten with unsalted butter and never on bread. For the full effect, consume with Zelta, a Latvian lager available in Canada.
This midwinter, I went organic with all ingredients (full-strength milk, pressed cottage cheese, brown eggs and butter) except caraway seeds and salt sourced from Organic Meadows in Guelph, Ontario.
—Georgs Kolesnikovs
Georgs Kolesnikovs, Cheese-Head-in-Chief at CheeseLover.ca, was born in Latvia but has lived in Canada most of his life, in Ontario, Québec and the Northwest Territories.
Ruth Khlasen, owner and lead cheesemaker at Monforte Dairy.
Monforte Dairy in Stratford, Ontario, will become a cheese school for eight weeks in February and March with eight students studying and practicing the fine art of artisan cheesemaking.
Ruth Klahsen, Monforte’s owner and lead cheesemaker (photo above), will share the curriculum with Neville McNaughton and Evelyn McManus.
McNaughton, widely known in the cheese business as Doctor Cheese, owns and operates CheezSorce in St. Louis,, Missouri, a consulting and training firm. His experience in cheese goes back 35 years to his native New Zealand. He has many clients in Canada.
Farmstead Gouda in the aging room at Mountainoak Cheese which has its grand opening on September 15. Click on any image at CheeseLover.ca for an enlarged view.
Adam and Hannie van Bergeijk will see their dream come true this Saturday, September 15, with the official opening of Mountainoak Cheese in New Hamburg, Ontario. For them, it’s the culmination of many years of hard work and planning. For the cheese enthusiasts, it could well be the beginning of a love affair with their superb Farmstead Gouda cheeses.
Adam and Hannie’s passion for making Gouda cheese started more than 30 years ago. In 1976, they took over the dairy farm run by Adam’s parents near the town of Spijkkernisse in their native Holland. From the beginning, they had an interest in making artisan cheese. The southwest area of Holland they lived in has a long and illustrious history of cheesemaking, so it was not hard to find willing teachers. In 1981, they both attended the renowned cheesemaker school in nearby Gouda, a center of cheesemaking expertise for more than 300 years. Since that time, Adam has passed on his knowledge to others as well, training students from countries throughout Europe in the art of making high quality Gouda cheeses.
Annie and Adam van Bergeijk ‘s dream of cheesemaking in Canada has come true.
In Holland, the van Bergeijks set up a small cheese plant right on their dairy farm. Their prize-winning cheeses were very popular with local consumers, and by the 1990s they were selling more than half the milk from their 60 cows as Farmstead Gouda direct to the public. But with two sons and a daughter, all interested in farming, there was little opportunity to grow as dairy farmers in the Netherlands.
In search of a brighter future for their children, Adam and Hannie sold the dairy and emigrated to Canada in 1996. They purchased land in Wilmot Township just east of the village of Haysville and built a modern freestall barn to provide comfortable housing for their new dairy herd. Since on-farm artisan cheese making was virtually unknown in Ontario, the van Bergeijks planned to focus on dairy farming only. Nevertheless, some of their original cheesemaking equipment found its way into the container destined for their new homeland, and it wasn’t long before they were making cheese for their own consumption.
Now that married sons Arjo and his wife Baukje on the home farm and John and his wife Angela on a second dairy nearby have taken over primary responsibility for the dairy operation, Adam and Hannie’s passion to make cheese is blooming once more. With the encouragement of family, friends and neighbours, they have embarked on a new cheesemaking adventure.
Mountainoak Cheese is a state-of-the-art operation but all the key steps in cheesemaking are still done by hand by an artisan craftsman. Here, Adam fills forms with blocks of Gouda-to-be.
Mountainoak Cheese is a state-of-the-art processing plant that allows the van Bergeijks to continue the tradition of great tasting high quality Gouda-style cheeses made with high quality fresh milk from their own dairy cows. Three days a week, right after the morning milking is completed, fresh milk from their herd of purebred Holsteins is pumped directly over to the cheese plant to begin the process. Using their 30 years experience and traditional Dutch recipes, the van Bergeijks have a reputation for making superb-quality Farmstead Gouda cheese. They also offer very interesting variations on spiced Gouda, using traditional cumin as well as black pepper, mustard seed, nettles and even gourmet black truffles.
To those unfamiliar with the Dutch language, “Mountainoak” may seem like an odd name for a local cheese produced in Waterloo County. There is no particular abundance of oaks on the farm, and certainly there are no mountains anywhere nearby either. A literal translation from Dutch to English of the family name “van Bergeijk”, would be “from the mountain oak.” Coming to a new land and eager to embrace the English language, they chose “Mountainoak Farms” as the name of their dairy. When their dream to make cheese in Canada became a reality, it just made sense that fresh Mountainoak milk should be made into high quality, all-natural, Mountainoak cheese.
The grand-opening celebration on September 15 will be held from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. at the farm, 4 kilometres south of Baden, just west of Wilmot Centre Road. The address is 3165 Huron Road, New Hamburg. The day will feature cheese sampling, self-guided tours of the processing plant, and information on how cheese is made. There is an official opening ceremony at 11:00 a.m., and a complimentary lunch including ice cream at noon. While all refreshments are complimentary, in light of the recent hurricane damage in Haiti, there will be opportunity to make a freewill donation to “Mission to Haiti Canada” at the event.
Congratulations to Shep Ysselstein for bringing his dream to life with the grand opening of Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese near Woodstock, Ontario, this Saturday. Cheese lovers are invited to the open house from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Welcome to Video Wednesday at CheeseLover.ca! This week’s clip was produced by Yeo Valley Organic, an organic dairy farm in the U.K. Enough said. Watch the vid.
