The cheese theft epidemic
By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - 0 Comments
Three per cent of our planet’s cheese is stolen every year
Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images
Forget candy bars and bubble gum: according to the U.K.’s Centre for Retail Research, over three per cent of our planet’s cheese is stolen every year—making it the “most stolen food item in the world.” Apparently, says Joshua Bamfield, director of the centre, “a lot of the theft is for resale and a lot of this cheese will be resold into other markets or to restaurants.” And he has a point. Yahoo! News reports that two Michigan men were recently caught stealing over $1,000 worth of provolone, and a group of ambitious shoplifters in Oregon attempted to roll three large wheels of cheese worth approximately $600 out of a supermarket. It’s hard to believe their motives were fondue related.
At home, Express Fine Foods in Toronto’s Greek village has resorted to keeping its cheese in the centre of the store under bright lights and a video camera, all to dissuade the too-familiar cheese thief. One staffer says cheese theft has become “a huge problem,” with patrons stealing the store’s cheese and “taking it to the bar for when they have a beer” (how he came to that conclusion remains a mystery). Other foods commonly targeted include fresh meat, baby formula, chocolate and seafood.
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A cheese so good people ‘attack’ it
By Pamela Cuthbert - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments
If you thought gouda was boring, you haven’t tried these versions of it
Photography by Andrew Tolson
I was at a bustling food fair in Italy when a cheese stopped me in my tracks. All other enticements—white truffles, rare molluscs, champagne—blurred into the background. Gouda would never be the same again.
That’s right, the stuff we know as “goo-duh”—mild, adaptable and as inexpensive as it is unremarkable—is having its potential pushed to extremes through aging processes: the rewards can turn out an ultimate taste experience that packs a punch of caramel, coffee and salt—or, if taken too far or mishandled, a wax-like inedible waste.
Afrim Pristine of Cheese Boutique in Toronto started importing, and then aging, a farmstead Gouda (meaning the milk is sourced from the family farm) from the family-owned Lindenhoff label after trying it with his dad at an international show. “We had a taste,” he says. “And then we freaked out!” He set out to see if he could buy up all of their supply. His cellar today is stocked with hundreds of the 11-kilo wheels. “In my opinion, this is one of the top five cheeses on the planet.”
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Why it’s the best time ever to be a Canadian
By macleans.ca - Friday, July 1, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 11 Comments
By many global measures we are a blessed bastion of privilege, peace, freedom—and big roomy houses
Dave Chidley/CP; Illustration by Taylor Shute
We are Canada. At 144 years we are neither young nor old, as nations go. And nations do come and do go, it bears remembering. You don’t have to be very old to appreciate that the world map that occupied a corner of your childhood classroom is a relic of another age; that borders once drawn in blood aren’t indelible at all, they are just lines to be moved, or bent or erased by popular will. Yet, here we are, still in this together, and doing rather well.
Like any worthy anniversary, it is deserving of celebration but also of the appreciation that future years together aren’t guaranteed, they must be earned, and mutually agreed upon. Back when Canada was a mere pup of 115 years, Ralph Klein, then the brash young mayor of a brash young Calgary, called Canada, “perhaps the only country in the world held together by curiosity.” He asked if such a confederation of interests and regions can endure. “[N]o one is quite prepared to give up on her yet,” he said, “as if we all have some lingering desire to see how this ongoing exercise in nation-building ends.”
And why not? No. 143 was not the easiest of years, but it was largely free of any soul-sucking existential debate on Canada’s future. There was a federal election, and no one died in the process. Economic uncertainty lingers, but we emerged stronger than the year before, and healthier in most every sense than a long list of wealthy, developed nations. And, yes, let’s not lose sight of that inarguable fact: we are rich.
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Fresh, warm—yes, warm—mozzarella
By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 5 Comments
Top-notch curds are the key to soft, sweet, squeaky-on-the-teeth cheese
Photographs by Andrew Tolson
Notwithstanding the distinct society’s insatiable appetite for french fries dressed with springy curds, or our pan-national enthusiasm for cheeseburgers made with gooey orange “singles,” mozzarella and cheddar are by far the most popular cheeses in Canada. And we make what we need: we produced at least 30,000 tonnes more of each last year than we did butter.
Most of that is made by our cheese giants, like Saputo and Kraft Canada. While even young, mass-market cheddar is still cheddar, in mozzarella’s case the industrial variety is a hybrid type pressed to expel moisture so it shreds easily and lasts for months. This is the variety that is even sold pre-shredded, for those too busy watching TV to do it themselves.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of quality, volume and price, you find the Italian progenitor, made from the rich and rarefied milk of the water buffalo—a product the Italians believe tastes best the day it is made, and should always be consumed within its first week, but are nonetheless willing to sell to us at a premium well after that. For this reason one does well to seek out local buffalo mozzarella, like the grassy, artisan product from Natural Pastures in Courtenay, B.C., on Vancouver Island, or the milder tasting version from Quality Cheese, in Vaughan, Ont.
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Ultimate grilled-cheese fighting
By Jacob Richler - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 4:31 PM - 1 Comment
The ‘world’s best sandwich’ gets frightening at the Grilled Cheese Invitational
Photograph by Liz Sullivan; Sandwich Courtesy of About Cheese
While we spend April trying to choose between our usual unpalatable options, down stateside, where even a minority of the popular vote is good for four years, they will instead be focused on National Grilled Cheese Month. It all comes to a head on the 23rd, in Los Angeles, where thousands of Americans barred from riding an elevator more than two at a time will converge hungrily on Center Studios for the 2nd 8th (yes, the second eighth) Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational.
“The competition is not necessarily the be-all and end-all of grilled cheese,” cautions Laura Werlin, author of the seminal Great Grilled Cheese: 50 Innovative Recipes for Stovetop, Grill, and Sandwich Maker, as well as its inevitable sequel, the just-published Grilled Cheese, Please!: 50 Scrumptiously Cheesy Recipes. “It’s a lot of fun, a means of celebrating the world’s best sandwich, and it brings out a lot of creativity.”
Werlin would know, for she was a judge at last year’s event (the 1st 8th GCI), where amongst other things, she was served a sandwich called the “Cheesy Mac and Rib,” a cheddar-based grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with a starch-boosting mound of macaroni and cheese, an ice-cream scoop of pulled pork and a blob of caramelized onion. “It sounds disgusting,” Werlin allowed over the phone from San Francisco, whence she will soon be travelling to judge again at this year’s GCI. “I have to say that I’m embarrassed to admit that there was something about the flavours and textures?… I enjoyed it.”
To see if you would, too, on April 6 tune in to the Food Network premiere of Eat St., a Canadian spin-off of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, built on the same unrelenting close-ups of well-exercised cheeks straining to accommodate yet another oversized sandwich. The episode opens with the Cheesy Mac and Rib, a creation of the L.A.-based Grilled Cheese Truck—perennial favourites at the GCI, a contest which began as a competition between friends, and by last year had grown to attract 250 competitors and 8,000 attendees.
The competition features four categories. The first is technique-focused, and celebrates the grilled cheese sandwich as most North Americans were first introduced to it: called “Love, American Style,” it limits competitors to white bread, butter and orange cheese. The second (“The Missionary Position”) allows freedom of choice in the selection of bread, cheese and butter, but forbids additional ingredients. The “Kama Sutra” embraces additional ingredients, but limits them to 40 per cent of the filling (60 per cent must be cheese). The final category is even more disturbing: “The Honey Pot” features the same basic rules, but its additional ingredients must be sweet, for a package that “would best be served as dessert.”
This makes several things very clear. First: these people obviously smoke a lot of dope. Second: someone like me who thinks the ultimate expression of the grilled cheese sandwich in winter is a croque monsieur (crustless pain au lait, Gruyère, béchamel, ham), and in summer, a panino caprese (focaccia, fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced tomato, basil), is obviously frighteningly conservative. And lastly, that the American-style, butter-soaked and sharp-cheddar-filled grilled cheese sandwich I occasionally serve my children for a quick lunch is apparently under grave and unsavoury threat.
I felt it last week when I ordered the daily grilled cheese at the Swan diner in Toronto and was given a sandwich filled with three cheeses (Swiss, Asiago and buffalo-milk cheddar) with sliced pear and watercress. It confirmed the expected: that while ripe pear and room-temperature blue cheese is lovely, molten, bland white cheese and crunchy pear is revolting. To feel better, I flipped through my copy of Grilled Cheese, Please!, settling on page 115: the Cheesus Burger, a creation of the Grilled Cheese Grill in Portland, Ore., features a massive burger slathered with ketchup and ballpark mustard sandwiched between two processed-cheese grilled cheese sandwiches, one dressed with onion, the second with pickle. “Oh!” said the waitress, looking at the picture as she cleared my plate. “I’ve seen that on thisiswhyyourefat.com!”
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Economists unite
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 12:47 PM - 47 Comments
Mike Moffatt announces the first major plank of the hypothetical Canadian Economists Party’s hypothetical platform: dairy supply management reform.
The cost to such a policy is high – Canadian consumers massively overpay for dairy products while at the same time our ability to enter into free trade agreements is limited by our subsidies to dairy farmers. The policy represents a wealth transfer from consumers to dairy producers of over 2 billion dollars a year (Source). I use dairy supply management as my example when I introduce The Logic of Collective Action to my Ivey students.
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The cheese plate gets competitive
By Lianne George - Friday, April 10, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment
Two cheddars, two Swiss and a flavoured havarti—where’s the sexy backstory in that?
Part of the burgeoning appeal of local artisanal cheeses—particularly in tough financial times, when more fine dining happens at home—is that, like wines, they offer hosts the opportunity to regale guests with tales of bucolic settings, meticulous producers, wholesome ingredients, and age-old production methods. “Traditionally, in weaker economic times, cheese has actually grown because it’s an affordable luxury,” says Kathy Guidi, dean of the Cheese Education Guild in Toronto, Canada’s first school for cheese “sommeliers.” Despite the downturn, the cheese-as-status-food trend shows no sign of receding. In some circles, assembling the right combination of cheeses—textures, flavours, pedigree—is more than a labour of love. It’s a competitive sport.“When we do our cheese boards here, we actually print out descriptions of all the cheeses for the customers,” says Christie Silversides of Toronto’s Leslieville Cheese Market. “They want to be able to tell their friends, ‘Hey, this is made in some little farm off in Prince Edward County, and it’s aged for two years—they want to know all of that.” With so much to learn, it’s not surprising some eager students have taken to cramming. Several of Silversides’ customers even keep cheese diaries, “little notebooks, so they know what they’ve tried and little notes about whether they liked it or not.”
