October 22, 2025

dreams of cheese in the fall

I have not made cheese in a good long while. Alas, alack! The next cheese I want to make is gorgonzola dolce, which I last made about two years ago. My version dried out too much, leading to vertical cracks and some infiltration of unwanted molds in the interior, but overall it had a great flavor. This time I am planning to wrap the aging cheese in paper and foil to keep the humidity higher.

Anyway let’s talk about blue cheeses.

The primary flavor culprit in blue cheese is, of course, Penicillium roqueforti, named for the most famous (and possibly the oldest, depending on which Gaulish cheese Pliny the Elder made fun of in his writings) of all blue cheese, the sheep-milk Roquefort. P. roqueforti can be blue or green and is closely related to a lot of other blue molds which occur naturally, though commercial strains have been carefully selected to produce the tastiest lipolysis and proteolysis and the fewest mycotoxins. Sheep milk, being significantly higher in butter fat than cow milk, stands up to the enzymatic action of the mold better. (You may notice a common thread from the last newsletter, when I discussed cardoon rennets, which are preferentially used with sheep milk. The huge predominance of cow milk cheese is a relatively modern phenomenon: in ancient Mesopotamia up to the early Middle Ages, sheep milk was preferred for cheesemaking.) In some cow milk blues, extra cream is homogenized into the milk to accommodate the significant breakdown of fats by the blue-green mold.

Traditionally, cheesemakers acquired the correct mold by putting rye bread in a damp cave until it got fuzzy (and two traditional Roquefort makers still use this method, Carles and Papillon.) There are a few cheesemakers outside of France who cultivate their own blue molds, including, I believe, Peter Dixon of Vermont, but most (including me) buy imported freeze-dried culture from France. There are many strains available, but I used the fast-growing Danisco PV variety available from cheesemaking.com. (There’s also a long tradition of American cheesemakers surreptitiously stealing mold from the French during cave tours, or at least saying they did.)

This points up another less visible but equally distinct characteristic of traditional blue cheeses: they have flourished in areas with access to damp, cool limestone caves, primarily the south-central bit of France called the Massif Central. While most cheeses are aged in high-humidity environments, blue cheeses are aged in really, REALLY high-humidity environments (see the problem with not doing so in my gorgonzola failure above.) P. roqueforti needs oxygen to work on the cheese paste, so the cut curd is allowed to seal up its edges a bit before it is put in the molds, which are not pressed, maintaining a very open (and dare I say it, crumbly) curd structure for the mold to move through. (The relatively high pH of this cheese also makes for a gappier curd.) A week or two into the aging process, the cheeses are usually needled, or aerated with a long spike in a regular grid, to allow the mold to flourish deep in the form. (I used a double-pointed knitting needle for this task.)

All of this makes for a cheese which dries out unusually quickly, while its characteristic mold needs to be pretty damp to grow. Thus the fleurines (limestone caves with constant air movement due to chimneys in the rock) of southern France were as vital to the maturation of these cheeses as the mold itself.

Other famous blues, like Stilton from northeastern England, originated as non-blue cheeses, which later became more well-known and desirable in their blue forms.

Blue cheeses tend to be more salty than many of their fellows, because extra salt causes the mold to grow in spore form rather than mycelial form, which produces a better texture and the characteristic blue-green color. Theoretically these cheeses age from the interior outward, raising their pH as they age (though I am not sure this is what happened with my gorgonzola, above, or my other cream-enriched soft blue cheese experiment.) I suspect this is also because P. roqueforti is not as aggressive a mold as the white molds characteristic of bloomy rinds, so the extra salt is necessary to discourage the growth of a lot of unwanted microflora which might out-compete our tasty mold.

Blue cheeses are dry-salted (that is, the rind is rubbed with salt, which slowly diffuses inward) to let the P. roqueforti run wild for a bit in the center of the cheese before the salt gets there to slow it down.

I plan for blue cheese will play a starring role in my next Regency Cheesemakers book, which takes place in Paris, and largely in a cheesemonger’s shop and a neighboring restaurant. I will note that some strains of P. roqueforti produce the toxins roquefortine C (a potent neurotoxin) and mycophenolic acid (an immunosuppressant), though I have not quite decided what to do with that fact.

Sources for this newsletter include: The Oxford Companion to Cheese, edited by Catherine Donnelly and Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, by Gianaclis Caldwell. I also flipped through Cheesemonger, by Gordon Edgar.

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OH HEY also it’s time for another giveaway of a great queer book! This month: a wondrous YA romance which I picked up by chance at Lovestruck Books when I saw the gorgeous cover: When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb.

This book is about a little old demon and a little old angel living in a shtetl in Ukraine at the end of the 19th century, who get word that someone from their village is in trouble in New York. They decide the only thing to do is go rescue her, which involves a long boat trip and many shenanigans. This book is very beautifully Jewish and very beautifully queer. The angel and the demon have been arguing Talmud with each other for hundreds of years, and the romance in this book is more about them discovering the depth of their love for each other than it is about falling into something new.

You can fill out the google form to enter the giveaway here.

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Shortly after the election last year, I read Nobody Knows My Name, a compilation of some of James Baldwin’s essays originally published in 1961.

In an essay called “East River, Downtown,” Baldwin says:

“. . . the Negro student movement . . . I believe, will prove to be the very last attempt made by American Negroes to achieve acceptance in the republic, to force the country to honor its own ideals. The movement does not have as its goal the consumption of over-cooked hamburgers and tasteless coffee at various sleazy lunch counters . . . The goal of the student movement is nothing less than the liberation of the entire country from its most crippling attitudes and habits . . .

The student movement depends, at bottom, on an act of faith, an ability to see, beneath the cruelty and hysteria and apathy of white people, their bafflement and pain and essential decency. This is superbly difficult. It demands a perpetually cultivated spiritual resilience, for the bulk of the evidence contradicts the vision.”

For some context: this essay was published when the Civil Rights Act was still three years away and the Voting Rights Act was still four years away. The Supreme Court had only decided Brown v. Board of Education seven years before this essay was written, and the governor of Arkansas had called up the National Guard only four years previously to stop nine Black students from entering a previously all-white high school in Little Rock.

At the moment Baldwin set these words to paper, he did not know what the outcome of decades of organized activism and centuries of resistance would be.

I think it can be a little hard to talk about what’s happening in the United States right now in a way that is both true and which does not provoke despair. And we are really in it now, my people: what is continuing to happen in LA and DC, what has unrolled with such violence in Chicago, both under the guise of immigration enforcement, amounts to a military invasion of U.S. cities by U.S. troops. That has some pretty dark implications for the future of our democracy and our rights as citizens, especially when one also considers the violent suppression of journalism and protest around these events.

But this is why we study history, right? Because we are not the first to go through dark times of violence and oppression. We are not the first people whose resistance has had to come from faith: a belief that, despite a whole boatload of evidence to the contrary, the sum total of all our small actions can drag this country away from militarized, white nationalist authoritarianism toward a free and open society.

I believe that we will be engaged in an intense legal battle for the United States to remain an open democracy with equal rights for all residents for the rest of my natural life. But the truth is that the United States has been battling toward true democracy for its entire existence. I am not despairing now because I see the incredible courage of protesters and journalists and local politicians on the ground around the country.

We are not the first to have to work toward justice without any promise of success, and we won’t be the last.

With that in mind, please consider supporting and sharing local news sources which are documenting this struggle in real time. I’ve mentioned LA TACO before, who are doing incredible work reporting on ICE activity in Los Angeles with a very small team, but in recent weeks I’ve also been hugely impressed by Block Club Chicago’s reportage. In the Boston area, I have been relying on more of a mixture of news sources, including public radio stations WGBH and WBUR, and local newspaper the New Bedford Light. (I also get the Boston Globe, whose coverage of immigration issues during this administration has so far been detailed and sympathetic; however, it is owned by the same billionaire who owns the Red Sox, so your mileage may vary.)

If it sounds like I’m repeating myself from past newsletters, of course I am! Because this isn’t a race or even a marathon. This is our whole lives, and how we make those free and just lives is by developing practices and habits which we return to on a daily basis.

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I am trying something new, for those who have gotten to the end of this very long newsletter: comments!

What are you doing in your community right now to support immigrant justice?

What books are you reading which provide delight, relief, or strength?

What cheeses are you eating?

In hope,

Sharon