Debate on feta heats up in Monroeville cheese class
For such a plain-looking, humble cheese, feta sure knows how to instigate controversy.
Case in point: The Great Feta Cheese Debate, which has been an issue in the European courts since 2002, had yet another public hearing before a cheese-loving jury last week at McGinnis Sisters in Monroeville.
With Greece’s economic woes making headlines, cheesemonger Karen Novak decided the time was ripe to devote her monthly cheeselovers’ class to the famous Greek cheese. Only instead of the usual show, tell and sample format, she decided to take a more novel approach to the free, after-hours class in the store’s cafe. She put different varieties of feta “on trial” and let students decide if any, or all, qualified as the real deal.
“We just thought it would be fun,” she said.
Co-workers Maggie Hilton acted as the prosecutor while Theresa Muir argued for the defense. Ms. Novak was the judge, and told the jury to “carefully ponder all the evidence given and cast your vote accordingly.”
At the heart of the lighthearted class, which included blind tastings of French, Greek and Wisconsin versions of feta, was the age-old question: What constitutes feta? And can it be made outside of Greece?
Cheesemakers in Greece, where the white, crumbly cheese, made from a mixture of goat’s and sheep’s milk, dates back thousands of years, aren’t ones to pussyfoot around the issue. They contend feta is so deeply engrained in Greek culture that only they should call claim to the feta label.
“My client, Greece, feels she is the only one entitled to that name and that heritage,” Ms. Hilton told the crowd.
So strongly, in fact, that the country in the 1930s laid out rules of production for feta to make certain it would be produced in accordance with centuries-old techniques. In 1994, it took the fight one step further, asking the European Union for Protected Designation of Origin status, a designation that requires a product to be prepared, processed and produced within a specific region — in feta’s case, Greece.
After long legal battles with Denmark, Germany and France, all of which make their own feta-like white brined cheeses (some just with cow’s milk), and who wanted the right to export it to other countries, Greece received PDO status in 2002.
“This assures our customers that our cheese is made in the traditional manner where our sheep and goats graze on the mountain sides of Cyrus,” Tracy Foley, marketing coordinator for Mt. Vikos Greek Feta, noted in an email to Ms. Novak.
She added: “Many other feta cheeses are made from cow dairy and not in the traditional ways of Greece, which is not authentic Greek feta, or feta at all.”
Cheesemakers in other parts of the world, including Canada and the United States, think otherwise. To them, feta is a generic term for any white, crumbly cheese stored in brine. Or as Ms. Muir maintained, “Feta made in Greece or any other country would taste as good whether it was called feta or some other name.”
Maybe. Last week’s jury decided. Mt. Vikos Feta from Greece was the best feta cheese of the bunch, with Odyssey feta made by the Klondike Cheese Co. in Wisconsin — featured in a Mediterranean salsa with olives and roasted tomatoes — coming in second. Participants also got to sample Valbresso Feta from France, a ultra-creamy variety crafted from sheep’s milk left over from Roquefort cheese production.
Feta is a good cheese for easy, breezy summer dishes. Its salty, tangy, crumbly texture lends itself perfectly to salads, and you also can’t go wrong pairing it with fruit, garden-fresh cucumbers, grilled zucchini and of course the flaky, tissue-thin phyllo. Ms. Novak marries the two into a healthful version of the Greek dish spanakopita.
Pressed into square cakes, commercial varieties sold in grocery stores are typically semi-hard and easy to crumble. But feta can be on the softer side, too. Valbresso melts on the tongue, and Ezra’s Feta, made by Bunker Hill Cheese in Millersburg, Ohio, from pasteurized skim cow’s milk sourced from Amish farms, is reminiscent of creamed cheese, but with a salty finish.
The might strike feta purists as just plain wrong, “But Chef Sara Moulton went wild about it, told all her foodie friends and started to blog about it,” Ms. Novak told her students as she passed out feta “truffles” made with it. “So now it’s a big deal.”
Roberta Walker of Monroeville, a semi-regular at Ms. Novak’s classes, was so impressed with her sample that she plans on serving the cheese at a picnic in August. “It’s so creamy,” she said. Crumbled feta is the easist to find in grocery stores, but if you buy a tub of feta in brine, it will last in your refrigerator for several months. That gives you ample opportunity to experiment with different recipes.