World Cheese Book

World Cheese Book shows you how to enjoy more than 750 of the world's finest cheeses and includes tasting notes and serving tips. World Cheese Book is the comprehensive guide to cheese and covers more world cheeses, with more photography, than any other book on the subject. Discover the flavor profile, shape, and texture of just about every imaginable cheese in this exhaustive, at-a-glance reference. Written by a team of experts, each writing about their own region, World Cheese Book is a treasure trove of information for the truly adventurous cheese lover and a complete guide to the world of cheese. A tour of the finest cheese-producing countries reveals local traditions and artisanal processes — from Europe, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia to the Americas to Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Images of each cheese (inside and out) give an up-close view of each variety. Step-by-step techniques show how to make cheese in your own kitchen. Complementary food and wine pairings round out the offerings in World Cheese Book with the best part of all: Learning how best to enjoy eating these uniquely wonderful cheeses.

This is an authoritative fact-packed guide to the cheeses of the world, combined with a fabulous collection of over 100 recipes.

EXPLORE THE WORLD OF CHEESE BY ASKING YOURSELF ONE SIMPLE QUESTION: WHAT CHEESES DO I ALREADY LOVE? This is the first book of its kind to be organized not by country, milk type, or any other technical classification. The Book of Cheese maps the world of cheese using nine familiar favorites, what author Liz Thorpe calls the Gateway Cheeses. From basics like Swiss, blue, and cheddar, Liz leads the way to more adventurous types. Love Brie? Liz shows you how to find other Brie-like cheeses, from the mild Moses Sleeper to the pungent Fromage de Meaux. Her revolutionary approach allows food lovers to focus on what they really care about: finding more cheeses to enjoy. Complete with flavor and aroma wheels, charts guiding you through different intensities and availabilities, and gorgeous photography, this is the only book on cheese you will ever need.

“We officially declare this the book of cheese. . . . The stunningly realistic illustrations are reason alone to buy the guide.” —Saveur, Our Favorite Cookbooks to Gift This Year “A cheese lover’s dream, educating aficionados through gorgeous pictures and fun, colorful graphics.” —BookPage Everything you need to know about the world’s great cheeses, including how they’re made, their universe of flavors, origins, and terroir. Organized by type, the book features more than 400 cheeses worth knowing—from fresh cheese and pressed cheese to blue cheese, soft cheese, and spreadable cheese. Each includes an an identifying illustration, nuts and bolts like the type of milk and fat content, and a brief, memorable description. Readers will find unexpected cheeses that are best for melting (Hushållsost), best for serving solo (Bovški Sir), and even the stinkiest (pick up some Allgäuer Weisslacker and see what company thinks). Includes dozens of maps; an aroma wheel to help refine your palate; a guide to composing cheese boards; tips for pairing with wine, beer, whiskey, cider; and so much more.

Maître fromager Max McCalman, author of The Cheese Plate and Cheese, is steeped in the world of artisanal cheeses like no one else. In Mastering Cheese, he shares the wealth of his expertise to help cheese lovers on their path to connoisseurship. After years of teaching courses for amateurs at the Artisanal Premium Cheese Center, where he is Dean of Curriculum, McCalman has developed a compelling set of classes for understanding and ex-periencing cheese. A full master's course in a book, Mastering Cheese covers the world of cheese in twenty-two distinct lessons, featuring tasting plates that deliciously demonstrate key topics. For example, a chapter titled "Stunning Stinkers" explains why some of the strongest-smelling cheeses can be among the best tasting and then recommends several stars of this category. Learn about the issues facing real raw-milk cheeses and then go out and taste the differences between these cheeses and those made with pasteurized milk. For the first time in any of his books, McCalman includes extensive information on the modern artisanal cheese revolution in the United States and prominently features these artisans and their products alongside the famous cheeses of Italy, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Complete with helpful charts and an invaluable index of more than 300 cheeses, Mastering Cheese is the definitive course that you can use in your own home to pursue your passion for cheese.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Entertainment Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • The Christian Science Monitor In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as “the telling room.” Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets—usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine. It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a larger-than-life Spanish cheesemaker named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras as he spun an odd and compelling tale about a piece of cheese. An unusual piece of cheese. Made from an old family recipe, Ambrosio’s cheese was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and was said to hold mystical qualities. Eating it, some claimed, conjured long-lost memories. But then, Ambrosio said, things had gone horribly wrong. . . . By the time the two men exited the telling room that evening, Paterniti was hooked. Soon he was fully embroiled in village life, relocating his young family to Guzmán in order to chase the truth about this cheese and explore the fairy tale–like place where the villagers conversed with farm animals, lived by an ancient Castilian code of honor, and made their wine and food by hand, from the grapes growing on a nearby hill and the flocks of sheep floating over the Meseta. What Paterniti ultimately discovers there in the highlands of Castile is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he first imagined. Instead, he’s sucked into the heart of an unfolding mystery, a blood feud that includes accusations of betrayal and theft, death threats, and a murder plot. As the village begins to spill its long-held secrets, Paterniti finds himself implicated in the very story he is writing. Equal parts mystery and memoir, travelogue and history, The Telling Room is an astonishing work of literary nonfiction by one of our most accomplished storytellers. A moving exploration of happiness, friendship, and betrayal, The Telling Room introduces us to Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, an unforgettable real-life literary hero, while also holding a mirror up to the world, fully alive to the power of stories that define and sustain us. Praise for The Telling Room “Captivating . . . Paterniti’s writing sings, whether he’s talking about how food activates memory, or the joys of watching his children grow.”—NPR

Offers detailed descriptions of the unique characteristics and tastes of two hundred varieties of cheese in an alphabetical listing that explains how to select the best cheeses, recommended wine pairings, and tips on shopping and storage.

Including more than 35 step-by-step recipes from the Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking Most DIY cheesemaking books are hard to follow, complicated, and confusing, and call for the use of packaged freeze-dried cultures, chemical additives, and expensive cheesemaking equipment. For though bread baking has its sourdough, brewing its lambic ales, and pickling its wild fermentation, standard Western cheesemaking practice today is decidedly unnatural. In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science. This book encourages home and small-scale commercial cheesemakers to take a different approach by showing them: • How to source good milk, including raw milk; • How to keep their own bacterial starter cultures and fungal ripening cultures; • How make their own rennet—and how to make good cheese without it; • How to avoid the use of plastic equipment and chemical additives; and • How to use appropriate technologies. Introductory chapters explore and explain the basic elements of cheese: milk, cultures, rennet, salt, tools, and the cheese cave. The fourteen chapters that follow each examine a particular class of cheese, from kefir and paneer to washed-rind and alpine styles, offering specific recipes and handling advice. The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion. The Art of Natural Cheesemaking is the first cheesemaking book to take a political stance against Big Dairy and to criticize both standard industrial and artisanal cheesemaking practices. It promotes the use of ethical animal rennet and protests the use of laboratory-grown freeze-dried cultures. It also explores how GMO technology is creeping into our cheese and the steps we can take to stop it. This book sounds a clarion call to cheesemakers to adopt more natural, sustainable practices. It may well change the way we look at cheese, and how we make it ourselves.