Reading melts away, leaving nutty scent
A cheese that not only tastes good but also does good makes you happy to part with your cash.
Every delicious wheel of Reading, a washedrind cow’s milk cheese from Vermont’s Spring Brook Farm, helps support the Farms for City Kids Foundation, which brings urban preteens to the 1,000-acre estate for a week of learning in an agricultural setting.
Tarentaise, the farm’s signature wheel, is one of Vermont’s most acclaimed cheeses, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Spring Brook Farm milks only about 40 Jersey cows, not enough to support the cost of the ambitious educational program. So the creamery’s management decided to buy milk from other farms to make a second cheese.
Two years ago, with the help of a French consultant — the same alpine cheese specialist who helped devise Tarentaise — Reading made its debut.
Produced with raw milk from two other farms and modeled after French Raclette, this broad 17- to 20-pound wheel has a flawless appearance. The rind is impeccable, evenly thin and the blush color of spring salmon, a sign that good bacteria have taken up residence. The rich butter color of the interior probably reflects the cows’ pasture diet.
The wheels for sale now were made three to five months ago, when Vermont grass was at its most lush. Cheeses produced in winter, when the cows are on hay, will probably be paler.
During its first few weeks in the creamery’s cellar, each wheel of Reading gets a regular sponge bath with a brine solution known as morge, a French term.
The job of the morge is to transmit bacteria from the older wheels to the younger ones, like a sourdough starter. After a month or so, workers substitute fresh brine for the morge, and the washing happens less frequently.
Those hardworking bacteria help produce Reading’s seductive aroma of salted peanuts and mushrooms. Semisoft, dense and creamy, a slice of Reading dissolves on the tongue, leaving behind that nutty scent and a lingering impression of salt. That saline finale is, for me, the cheese’s only blemish.
Look for Reading at Cowgirl Creamery, Say Cheese and Mission Cheese in San Francisco and Oxbow Cheese Merchant in Napa. At under $20 a pound, it’s one of the best values at the cheese counter.
Russian River Brewing’s Redemption, a spicy Belgian-style blond ale, manages this robust cheese handily. A dry or off-dry Pinot Gris could work, but Reading will vanquish most red wines. Next up: Fraga Farms Foster Lake.