Tag Archives: cheese

What’s It Like to Be a (Temporary) Vegan?

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Vinny’s cheeseless veggie pizza

So, what’s it like to go from an oyster slurping, pork braising, cheese grating, cream swilling chef and eater to one that’s not?

It’s incredibly easy and hard at the same time.

For the most part, V-month was FABULOUS. Much better than the time I tried to drink Soylent for a week. Unlike Soylent week, which was mindnumbingly boring, I’ve had tons of room to experiment with new foods and flavors.

I’ve concluded that it’s best to understand vegan food as vegetable, fruit and grain based dishes, not meat or cheese imitations. For the most part, vegan alternatives are invariably not the same as the original, and this leads people to be uncomfortable about “weird” textures and flavors. We go down the wrong path when we tell people “you won’t miss X, you’ll love this (can’t possibly be the same as the original) vegan version instead!” The dish might be good on its own merits, but I can’t help comparing it to what I’ve had before. But when I don’t try to mimic meat dishes, there are no voices in my head trying to compare what I’m eating to something else. In other words, it’s better to get pizza without cheese than pizza with soy cheese, so that you can divorce yourself from your prior expectations. I’ve tried two kinds of vegan cream cheese so far, and while they were fine, mentally I never really got over that they weren’t the same as cream cheese. So I switched to just using hummus or peanut butter on my bagels.

On my own, I can stick to a vegan diet relatively easily. However, external pressures and social obligations complicate matters. On one occasion, I ended up at a bar near Penn Station for dinner, and pretty much the only thing I could eat was French fries and beer. (Wait, I guess that’s not really a problem.) It’s also awkward to say no when people offer me food. After a good friend made red-wine braised oxtail for dinner and invited me over, I had to say no. As someone who often gives food as a sign of care and affection, it feels terrible to turn down someone else’s offering, especially if it’s homemade. I told people at the beginning of the month that I was trying a vegan diet, but no one really remembered. For this particular dinner party, I ended up bringing my own food, which was a good compromise but I was lucky that I’d cooked ahead of time.

For the first time, I also have to read food labels carefully. It gives me a sense of what it’d be like to have a food allergy. Is that milk in the frozen naan? Why on earth would you put milk powder in gluten-free flour?

Vegan Mapo Tofu

What have you been cooking?

Lots of things! There’s the usual assortment of grain salads, beans and vegetable sides, but for me, the easiest jumping point is to cook Asian food, which is generally dairy-free already, and easy to make vegetarian. I loved these recipes for mushroom mapo tofu and braised eggplant with tofu. I also made time for vegan desserts (who says vegan means healthy?) and had a blast with this chocolate cake and these carrot cake cookies.

The seemingly Sisyphean task that I wanted to accomplish was to create a good vegan cheese sauce (read: one indistinguishable from your average cheddar sauce). I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of vegan cheese sauce recipes, and honestly, none of them are great when I compare them to actual cheese sauce. This recipe for vegan mac & cheese left me wrinkling my nose initially. However, if I tried to think of it as pasta tossed with butternut squash and creamed cashew sauce, then that changed matters entirely and I could enjoy it on its own merits.

One unexpected perk was that I could now swap food with vegan and veg-inclined friends, who tend to cook a fair amount out of necessity. I usually cook in massive batches over the weekend and end up eating the same thing for days afterwards. Suddenly I had more people to swap food with, and that was a nice communal experience.
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A Grating Topic: Parmesan Cheese

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Toward the end of 2008, there was an unpopular multi-million dollar bailout by the government for the benefit of a single industry. No, I’m not talking about Wall Street, or the auto manufacturing industry, or insurance on obscure structured finance products. I’m talking about the Italian cheese market.

Back when the rest of the world’s politicians were stumbling over how to manage the global financial crisis, Italy enacted measures to help its cheesemakers. The government bought up 100,000 wheels of the highly touted parmesan cheese, along with 100,000 wheels of another popular cheese, grano padano. The reason? The wholesale price of these cheeses had fallen to €7-7,50/kg, below the production cost of €8-8,50/kg needed to make traditional parmigiano-reggiano cheese. And if the country’s signature cheese industry went under, what else would Italy have to offer? Mio dio! Thus, much parmesan was bought to help prop up the price and rescue Italy’s 430 or so parmesan cheesemakers. The food was subsequently donated to charity.

Now, you may be an Italian taxpayer or a mozzarella maker who is cheesed off about these interventionist government shenanigans, but all this goes to show that parmesan cheese is Kind of a Big Deal in Italy. In 2009, just under 3 million wheels of the stuff were produced, for sales totaling € 1.533 billion. For an industry that claims to be comprised of only small-scale, artisanal cheese producers, these numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
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Époisses: Durian of Cheeses?

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Le Renard s’en saisit, et dit : « Mon bon Monsieur, / Apprenez que tout flatteur / Vit aux dépens de celui qui l’écoute : / Cette leçon vaut bien un fromage, sans doute. » -Jean de La Fontaine

“Have you ever tried Époisses cheese?” I shook my head no. “Well, you know how they ban carrying the durian onto trains in Singapore because the fruit is so smelly? Époisses is sort of like the durian of cheeses.” With that in mind, I walked into the Fromagerie Gaugry cheese factory and my nose curled from the sharp olfactory assault of ripened cheese. The Époisses smell was pungent and earthy, somewhere between unwashed socks and West Coast hippies. As this NYT article highlights, its reputation and odor precede it. On the plus side, within a few minutes, my nostrils adjusted to the odor and I was breathing regularly again.

France boasts many stinky cheeses, but the Époisses is one of the most prominent cheeses of Burgundy, with production dating back to the 16th century. Over the years, Époisses has acquired the moniker “King of Cheeses,” and it was a favorite of Napoleon and famed gastronome Brillat-Savarin. At the 1815 Congress of Vienna, it seems that the delegates had a bit of free time after deciding what to do about Napoleon, and they held a tasting contest with 49 cheeses. Époisses came in second place after Brie, though one might argue that this was because Brie came from the Talleyrand region which sponsored the competition.

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Hiking the Männlichen Summit

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View from Männlichen into the Grindelwald valley

In German, the word for hiking is wandern, and can be expanded to mean anything from migrating, journeying and wandering. And indeed, you can do quite a lot of hiking in Switzerland simply by wandering from signpost to signpost on the country’s 50,000 km of marked trails. Even the smallest mountain outposts are easily found via an intricate system of wanderwege routes (marked by yellow signs) found between lakes, valleys and towns, higher altitude bergwege mountain paths (marked by white-red-white blazes), and rugged alpine routen trails (marked by white & blue blazes) that can include steep drop-offs and sections with cables or handholds.

Since the phrase “relaxing vacation” is not in our vocabulary, Britton and I spent our last day in Berner-Oberland hiking. The guide at Balmer’s suggested taking the train from Interlaken to Wengen (with a train transfer at Lauterbrunnen). Round-trip tickets for this cost about CHF 25. From Wengen (1,274 m), we would hike the route to In Gassen and Männlichen (2,227 m), then walk along the mountain ridge to Kleine Scheidegg (2,061 m), and finally trek downhill from Kleine Scheidegg toward Wengernalp back to Wengen.  On the Jungfraubahnen Wandern map, that would be routes 46, 33 and 41.

The morning was marked with a heavy downpour and ominously thick cloud cover, and I silently fretted about what we were going to do if the rain didn’t ease. Fortunately, the skies cleared at about 10:30 am, and we set off with backpacks full of bread, cheese, salame and light clothing. Personally, I think that hiking in sneakers is often safer than using thick-soled hiking boots because you will have a better feel for the terrain. Besides, hiking boots are heavy, and that extra weight goes a long way when you are scaling a mountain. The same goes for hiking poles; they can be helpful if you’re going downhill, but for the most part, you’re better off using your hands for balance and feet to feel the ground. I had to laugh at the hikers decked out in shiny layers of North Face and poles on flat sections of trail. Newbs.
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Swiss Eats: Cheese, Chocolate and…Pasta?

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Clockwise: Beef carpaccio and Swiss cheese rolls with olive oil and rösti from the Cafe de Paris (Interlaken); luxemburgerli from Confiserie Sprüngli; raclette with potatoes, pickles and pickled onions; confections to celebrate Swiss National Day (Aug 1)

“I might be done with cheese after this week in Switzerland,” I joked to the waitress. She looked at me with consternation. “Oh no, I could never be done with cheese!”

From soft to extra-hard, holey to solid, in all shades of white, amber and yellow, the Swiss love their cheese and produce about 450 different varieties of it. Whether melted in fondue pots or simply sliced in thin sheets and eaten atop bread, cheese is ubiquitous on menus and the core of most traditional Swiss dishes. Fondue is fairly common in the US so I bypassed that, but for a (relatively) less intense cheese option, you can order raclette, which is both a type of cheese and a dish featuring this cheese. The cheese round is heated, then scraped (from French racler, meaning “to scrape”) onto the diner’s plate, and usually served with boiled potatoes, pickles and pickled onions. Another popular Swiss dish is rösti, or grated, fried potatoes similar to hash browns. Be warned that if you order rösti, you will often get an entire plateful of potatoes, in the shape of the frying pan. The rösti can come topped with cheese, speck, onions or other condiments.

For those craving a sugar high, Switzerland’s other strong suit is their chocolates and sweets. If you are traveling in Zürich, be sure to grab some luxemburgerli, a confection produced exclusively by Confiserie Sprüngli. The luxemburgerli are delightfully airy, and look like miniature macarons about 1″ in diameter, with a sugar-based biscuit top and bottom, and creamy filling in the center. Traditional flavors include chocolate, vanilla, champagne and cappucino, and you can also get seasonal variations like lemon and raspberry. I tried the hazelnut and cassis (currant), and both were delicate flavor bombs, chock full of fresh, natural ingredients. Confiserie Sprüngli also produces fine chocolate products; don’t forget to try the Truffes du Jour.
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Hiking and Ruminating the Italian Alps

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Clockwise: Mural of a mountain goat and cow outside Fratelli Lussiana creamery, fresh wheels of cevrin in warm room, foothills of Piedmont, aging wheels of cevrin in cold room

A couple weeks ago while on the Piedmont stage, our class visited Fratelli Lussiana creamery, a cheese producer in Giaveno, about 35 km west of Turin. The primary cheese they produce is cevrin di Coazze, made with half goat and half cow’s milk and aged for 3 months. At the time, I was tired, hot and not in the mood to see yet another farm, but we all fell headlong in love with this cheese producer. After showing us an overview of the cheesemaking process and aging rooms, the lovely Lussiana siblings piled us into a hay-filled tractor and trundled us up a narrow, rocky mountain path, while we tried to keep our balance, yodeled and ducked under overhanging tree branches. Once we reached the mountaintop farm, we were greeted by a herd of seriously dexterous goats, placidly ruminating cows, and the friendliest donkey in the world (who kept sneaking into photos and nuzzling for attention). The farm caretakers welcomed us with fresh wheels of cevrin, salame, bread and red wine, and we ate cheese next to the animals who produced the milk for it, as the sun went down over the Italian Alps. It was one of the best days of my life.

Determined to recapture some of that high, some of my classmates decided to contact Fratelli Lussiana and ask if they would allow us to return for a second visit. Only, this time we wanted to see the cevrin making process, which happens every morning at 6 am. With the 90 minute drive from Bra, this meant that we would be setting out on a 4:30 am road trip. Totally worth it!

After duly waking up at a rather uncivilized hour, the first challenge was figuring out how to get back to the creamery. We were armed with an address of questionable accuracy (the GPS was telling us to go to a different town) and also a phone number. To complicate matters, no one present was terribly fluent in Italian. So, over the next hour, we called three times, and using an amalgamation of broken Italian and French, managed to get within a few streets of the creamery. As we drove through Giaveno, desperately looking for familiar landmarks, we spotted an elderly gentlemen walking briskly down the street. I rolled down a window and asked him for directions to Fratelli Lussiana, and he broke into a toothy grin and began to wave wildly. Seeing our blank reactions, the man said, “You know what, I’d better just point out the way myself, do you mind if I hop in the car?” And before I knew it, I was scooting to make room for a swarthy Italian man in the backseat. We explained that we were students at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, interested in cheesemaking, and he said “Ah yes, of course! Who do you know of the Lussiana brothers? Oh Luigi, yes I know Luigi!” Within a few minutes, he had steered us to the creamery. We thanked him for his help and asked if he needed a ride back. “No no, I walk a lot, 20 km a day! I’ll be just fine.” He stuck his head into the barn to say hello to Luigi, and sauntered off back into town.
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