Bonjour, my cheese loving friends! I finally feel settled in at the new job, and am so excited about all of the cheeses available to me that were not before- and I can’t wait to tell you guys about them! Let’s start it out with this adorable little guy: Cowgirl Creamery’s St Pat!

Country of Origin: United States- California, to be precise!

Milk type: Pasteurized Cow’s milk (moooo!)

Rennet type: Vegetarian (safe for everybody!)

Cowgirl Creamery is one of my American producers of cheese. Based out of Point Reyes, if you’ve ever been to the Ferry Building in San Francisco, you’re sure to have seen Cowgirl’s cheese shop! Not many of Cowgirl’s cheeses make it to the middle of the United States, but I’m always thrilled when they do!

St Pat is Cowgirl Creamery’s spring seasonal cheese (it’s fall/winter counterpart is Devil’s Gulch, which has red pepper flakes on the rind), and these small format wheels are each wrapped with nettle leaves!  Now, if you’re thinking ‘nettles in my food- are you crazy!?’- I’m not! The nettle leaves used in the making of St Pat are frozen, which removes the sting (although I *have* had a nettle cheese where the ‘sting’ was still there- it’s not devastating or terrible, just a very strange sting at the back of your mouth! Some cheeses even use nettles as the coagulant, in place of rennet).

Another awesome thing about St Pat’s, is that like Mt Tam (another one of Cowgirl’s greats!), it is made with organic milk! Not many cheeses in my specialty case can claim to have been made from organic milk- a great point of distinction! In the beginning, St Pat’s was made from a mix of Jersey and Holstein cow milk, but in 2009, a local farm near Cowgirl Creamery received their organic certification for their herd of jersey cows- and Cowgirl decided to run with it for St Pat! Jersey cow milk generally makes some of the creamiest cheeses out there, due to it’s high fat content. That higher fat content helps lead to a very decadent and rich end product! Another neat thing about production of St Pat- it is a washed curd cheese; meaning that extra whey is washed off of the curds, which results in a sweeter cheese (without the addition of sugar!).

You guys may have guessed that I love decadent things- especially when it has cheese involved! Well, I would like to present to you a cheese who's photo should be in the dictionary when you look up "decadence"- Cremeux de Bourgogne! Let's get the basics out of the way:

Country of Origin: France of course- they've perfected bloomy rinds!

Milk type: Cow's milk, pasteurized.

Rennet type: Animal (stereotypically French, sorry vegetarians!)

Cremeux is a triple creme (hey, I guess that I should have mentioned that from the get go, but really- 'decadent' and 'triple creme' pretty much go hand in hand for me), made in the Bourgogne region of France- which is something that sets it apart from other French bloomy rinds; most of them are actually produced in Normandy, in Northern France.

One of my favorite customers comes in asking for the "butter cheese"- this is what he's looking for. What he means though, is that this cheese is so melt-on-your-tongue rich, that it is reminiscent of butter. I mean, come on! Just look at that creamline right underneath the rind, where the paste has evolved into something spreadable, spoonable, silky- looking like it wants to just ooze out of the cheese (but it doesn't, not quite yet- which means that it is pretty much 'a point'- or perfectly ripened!). The texture is almost like creme fraiche, and while the flavors begin with a milky hint to them, by the time the cheese has reached this ripeness-  buttery is absolutely the best descriptor!

Like many French cheeses that don't age for long, the  Cremeux that we see in the United States is a pasteurized version, though within France, you're more likely to stumble upon a raw milk version. As a cheesemonger, I daydream about the day when I'll be able to get back to France and find the raw milk, traditional, original versions of cheeses. It'll come!

Because I can never resist this cheese, I just wanted to do a quick revisit to one of my favorites: ewephoria. (I’ve always had a sweet tooth, so my love for this caramely, butterscotchy cheese is absolutely no surprise.) We couldn’t get the extra-aged version for a couple of months earlier this year, and though it was still tasty, the younger version was just … not as flavorful and didn’t have as many tyrosine crystals. (Did I tell you guys that tyrosine is an amino acid that our bodies can’t produce, but that works with our olfactory bulb to create norepinephrine, a depression fighter and focus aid, and dopamine, one of our feel-good neurotransmitters? There’s actual science behind cheese making us happy!)