Advice you can taste. Adventure you can feel.

Party Weotta Style (Part2) Cheese

Now that you know all about drinks let’s move on to food.

Let’s start off with our favorite food to serve at parties, cheese. We love serving cheese. It tastes great, and in our opinion, it is a mandatory part of any cocktail party. There are so many different kinds of cheese to choose from… you have hard ones like parmesan, soft ones like brie, fresh ones like mozzarella, funky ones like blue, and salty ones like Manchego. You can have a lot of fun mixing them up, and don’t be afraid to try new ones. O ya, and never get the sliced stuff… it is for sandwiches only.

We are lucky to live in California where we have so many wonderful cheeses made right here. Some of the California cheeses we love are…

• Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk: It’s a triple cream brie-like cheese packed with layers of bold pungent flavors.
• Cypress Grove Chevre’s Humboldt Fog: It is quite deceptive. Yes, it is a nice mild goat cheese, but inside there is a layer of ash that gives it a tangy cool sharp flavor.
• Rouge et Noir’s Marin French Gold: Roug et Noir’s produces some of the best traditional bries and camemberts outside of France. Their Marin French Gold is our favorite. It is so light and fluffy, perfect with berries or an ice wine.

O ya and once a year we have our very own California Artisan Cheese Festival. This year it is March 20th-23rd. Weotta go enjoy some great handcrafted California cheese.

Some of our favorites from outside California are

• Parrano: It from the Netherlands; although, it thinks it is Italian. It can be best described as mild, a little salty, a little crunchy, pretty hard, and somewhat sweet.
• Cave-aged Gruyere: Ya it is from Switzerland, but it is way different than normal Gruyere.  It is a little harder, nuttier, more rustic tasting, and packed with flavor.
• Raclette: This cheese kinda stinks, but it is packed with flavors that are so lovely. Once you taste it you will either hate it or want more… lots more. It is traditionally melted and served warm, but we love it cold as well. In fact, a few of the folks at Weotta can consume a half pound block of this cheese in under an hour… it really is that good.
• Haloumi: We have mentioned this lovely cheese before. It is the Greek grilling cheese…we love it, everyone we serve it to loves it and no-one can ever get enough of it…just ask Naval. It is quite unique and really only comes to life when pan-fried or grilled. When done it has a nice golden brown outside, a creamy center and the saltiness of feta. Don’t worry, it never gets too soft and yes, it is obvious when it is done. Enjoy it smeared on bread. If you aren’t convinced you will love it watch this short clip…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtToWrL42_o]

So now that you are craving cheese… bet you want to know where to buy the good stuff. Here in SF we are lucky we have some fantastic places to buy cheese, like Cow Girl Creamery in the ferry building and Rainbow Grocery. We go to Rainbow a lot for all sorts of foods, but they have an amazing selection. In fact, Rainbow has all the cheeses we have mentioned above at quite reasonable prices. BiRite also has a nice compact selection of unique things. Whole Foods has a little bit of everything as well. For those of you on a budget or just like a good deal, Trader Joe’s has many of the same things as Whole Foods for quite a bit less… it really is your best bang for the buck. And for those of you who want some really unique stuff go to artisanalcheese.com … you will find all sorts of cheeses you never knew existed.

Wow, never expected to go on about cheese that long, guess we really do love the stuff… if you want to learn more you could always sign up for cheese school.

To be continued…