[Pigging by Wilfrid: July 11, 2011]
It took a little hunting around online to find out who won this veritable "smackdown" last Friday night. Or Saturday morning.
Worth the journey from Portland for Steve Jones of that city's Cheese Bar who beat thirty nine of his caseophile peers to take the $1,000 first prize. I was fast asleep by that time.
Cheese porn after the jump.
When I left Cheese-O-Mania around 10.30, our own Anne Saxelby had taken the lead, after telling me she half-hoped to be knocked out in the first round so she could go home to bed. Not that this evinced any lack of enthusiasm for the event - a great opportunity for cheesemongers to network and for the rest of us to eat cheese until it came out of our ears. But nobody could argue that the competition element of the evening dragged a little.
Much expanded from the first Cheese Invitational last year, prodding forty cheesemongers - a few of them very thoroughly refreshed - through four rounds of "battles" proved logistically challenging.
The first round simply required each competitor to introduce themselves and describe their favorite cheese. The lesson I took away from this is that cheesemongers need to work on their microphone technique. Anne, in her usual no-nonsense way, had taken instruction. "Apparently you hold it close to your mouth and talk straight into it." Yes, that works.
Round two was a chaotic blizzard of cheese guzzling as the forty men and women wearing aprons and numbers crowded the stage like so many starving pigeons trying to identify a vast number of cheeses in a free-for-all blind tasting.
Perhaps a Nathan's-style speed eating battle would have been appropriate. I was impressed by the express delivery of food to mouth.
As you can tell, this really wasn't much of a spectator sport. The audience milled around and drank some more while it was going on. Collecting the answer sheets, marking them, adding up the scores and setting up for round three took an hour or so, and although there was plenty more cheese being hefted onto the stage, I decided to stagger home. I was, after all, full of several beers and about eight pounds of cheese.
And that's the good news about the event (and the reason I'll go again). A $25 ticket bought you unlimited access to an astronomical amount of good cheese at a running buffet catered by Tia Keenan, late of Casellula and currently developing a new cheese restaurant to be called The Make Room.
The pictures can speak for themselves. I would estimate sixty to one hundred cheeses offered, domestic and international. Some people waited a long time on line. The Pink Pig arrived when the doors opened, and had circuited the buffet twice before there was a wait. I didn't see anything run out.
Among the novelties, a kind of cheese sushi: blue cheese, wasabi, something sweet (plum?) on a little sheet of nori. I would have photographed it if I hadn't been holding two plates while trying to eat it. Surprisingly good.
At a side table, some fine French cheeses had been aged by a guest master-affineur, Rudolph Meunier, who was also on the judging panel. Other stands were doing things with hot Raclette, including pouring it over chocolate - which I wasn't sure about.
Other than arriving as the doors open, the other secret was to grab a plate and hang onto it for the rest of the evening (okay, I did grab two). Much more likely to run out of plates than cheese.
In addition to the cheese, there were breads, crackers, chutneys and relishes, fine hams, and a few sweet things. Disarmingly there was some fudge cut into cubes which I mistook for one of those Scandinavian brown cheeses like Gjetost. Ha, at least I wasn't the person who ate a large mouthful of butter thinking it was cream cheese.
This was one of the few occasions in my life where I thought "I can never eat another piece of cheese ever again." This turned out to be a temporary condition. I know; I've checked since.
Fact freaks must have patience with this post. The very circumstances of consumption made note-taking quite impossible. If you ask me what I tried, the answer is "everything." No, I didn't like everything, but there were so many fine cheeses it's hard to pick stand-outs. Okay, the Étuve was knockout.
A local cheeseman, Kevin Murphy of Barnyard on Avenue C considering his answers.
Organizer Adam Moskowitz, a cheesemonger son-of-a-cheesemonger, organized the event at his Larkin specialty food storage location in Long Island City. In his own mind it was not just a cheese event but some sort of warehouse hip hop dance party. "Whoo!" - as we were repeatedly encouraged to scream.
I guess I am one of the "old timers" in Adam's terms. But no complaints about the cheese.
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