Cheese. Why should it be so funny? Sadly, this food product is much maligned, probably because we’ve been brought up on too many gluey Kraft singles. Last weekend, the students of Slow Food gave themselves the mission to educate us about what cheese has the potential to be.
On Sunday afternoon, anybody passing through upper Sayles would have found tables spread out there, with sample stations for a variety of specialty cheeses. Slow Food members cut the blocks of cheese into little chunks for people to pick up with toothpicks. For the soft cheeses, they spread smears onto water crackers.
Many of the cheeses are local, such as “Goodhue Wash” (from the county, not the dorm) and “Wabasha Wash” from Wisconsin. Others have exotic-sounding names like “Zamorano” or “Brie de Nangis,” and one particular kind of Gouda even has boiled nettles in it. (The nettles don’t sting, they just give it an interestingly herby flavor, kind of like oregano.) The Grayson comes with a caution – “very strong” markered onto the Post-It note beside it.
Students wander around with toothpicks and appreciative looks. As they do so, the Slow Food folks take the opportunity to make educational conversation. For example, cheddar is not just one kind of cheese, says Adelle Housker ’10. It actually refers to the process of aging cheese in cloth. There’s also the fact that Parmesan that’s been aged for two years is different from Parmesan that’s been aged for six years. Neither of them come from a green can.
These cheese samples came from Surdyk’s, a special cheese store in the Twin Cities. We can’t all just pop over to Surdyk’s, so I asked Hillary Wiener ’11, the club’s president, how one could eat good food with a college student’s limited means. “I don’t think that eating well has to be expensive,” she says. These cheeses do cost more than the blocks of orange stuff you can get at Econofoods, but at $10 a pound, that’s not exorbitant. You probably won’t be eating too much of the cheese at a time, so it’ll last you a long time. Hillary says one of the keys to eating well on a budget is to practice cooking things for yourself. “It’s eating at the restaurants that really costs you.”
The tasting was a hit, judging by the number of students who dropped by. This is the third year Slow Food has done it and they hope they’ll be able to do it again. Because they’re a small club, “we try to have one campus-wide event each term.” Previously this year Slow Food organized the Iron Chef competition with the help of Culinary House in the fall and a tea party in the winter. The annual cheese tasting, though, might be about to disappear. The club is down to five members who regularly participate, and some of them are seniors who will be graduating next year. If Slow Food doesn’t gain enough new members next year, they won’t have enough people to continue organizing events.
The future of the cheese tasting is uncertain, but this year it was undoubtedly a success. We all learned to appreciate our cheese a little bit better.
