10 New Cheeses for the New Year

Last week Punxsutawney Phil let us know that there’s more winter ahead of us, but thankfully there is plenty to celebrate with the new year, and some spectacular new cheeses for homebound fromageophiles to enjoy during the long days ahead. We reached out to some of our most discerning colleagues to ask them to recommend something new for folks to get festive with, choice cheeses that have become available within the past six months or so, demonstrating the relentless creativity of creameries, even in suboptimal times. Their recommendations are well worth seeking out and sinking one’s teeth into.

Jill Tardiff of Saxelby Cheesemongers in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market recommends two luxurious newcomers from nearby Vermont. “I love to showcase this pair,” she notes, “because one is a new offering from a longtime leader in artisanal cheese and the other is from a respected 15-year-old farm that just began to make cheese in 2019”

Sherry Gray photo credit Jasper Hill Farm

Sherry Gray from Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro is an ash-ripened double crème made with Jasper Hill’s own milk, with additional cream from Monument Farms Dairy in the Champlain Valley. The ash tempers the surface pH of the wheels and the buttery yellow paste has a rich, whipped cream mouthfeel. Visually, that misty silver rind yielding the sunny center makes for a dramatic presence on a cheeseboard. (“Sherry”, by the way, doesn’t refer to the cheese’s flavor—Sherry Gray was an eccentric Greensboro resident, and the cheese is named in his honor).

Swallow Tail Tomme photo credit Stony Pond Farm

Swallow Tail Tomme is the latest offering from Melanie and Tyler Webb’s Stony Pond Farm in Fairfield where cheese is a new addition to the couple’s well-known organic milk and grass-fed beef. A small-batch raw milk cheese cave-aged for a minimum of 60 days, it’s light and nutty and, says, Tardiff “it has a beautiful natural rind with a gray taupe color that reminds me of deer in winter.”

Dave Phillips, cheese manager, and monger for Potash Markets in Chicago (and a frequent Cheese Professor contributor) calls deserving attention to two distinctive new arrivals:

After Glow photo credit Fromagination

From Blakesville, Wisconsin’s little-creamery-that-could, which opened mid pandemic, Phillips points out After Glow, cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza’s booze-infused double-down on local terroir. Pedraza brines dense goat cheese with New Glarus Belgian Red Ale, brewed in nearby Door County. The ale, which has been praised as a “marriage of wine and beer”, incorporates Wisconsin’s famed Montmorency cherries and infuses the cheese with a subtle fruity aroma. And while there’s an obvious top-choice beverage pairing with After Glow, it works beautifully with a wide range of ciders, fruit beers, and brandies.

Walden photo credit Sequatchie Cove Creamery

Phillips’ other pick originates far beyond Dairyland:  Walden is a luscious-textured and mildly flavored Reblochon-style cheese made by the Arnold family’s solar-powered Sequatchie Cove Creamery in Tennessee. Made from pasteurized milk and aged 30 days, it has a gentle, accessible butter-and-mushroom taste. And its white floppy discs are seductively photogenic.

Lindeline photo credit Will Kallenborn

Randall Felts of The Beautiful Rind cheese shop, shares his fellow monger’s Blakesville Creamery fandom, underscoring this new cheesemaker’s rapid rise among fromageophiles.  Says Felts of Blakesville’s Lindeline, a lemony, herbaceous goat cheese with a funky, ashed rind and striated paste: “In addition to being wonderful, it is the sort of cheese that we love selling to customers to expand their cheese experience.  It is as beautiful on the plate as it is on the palate so people always ask about it. It looks like Humboldt Fog, which most everyone knows and loves. However, it is made with geotrichum so we use it as a gateway to earthier more robust styles of cheese. It is a great gateway cheese!”

Alpencheddar photo credit Hofkäserei Kraus

DiBruno Brothers’ cheese manager Hunter Fike in Philadelphia is a chest beater for Alpencheddar an inventive new specimen of German engineering: As the curds for a traditional raclette are setting, a wheel of mature cheddar is shredded into the vat. On his well-worth following Instagram account, Fike muses “I've always thought that the natural next step in the progression of cheese pairings would be cheese-on-cheese. We've all had cheese with jam and chutney, beer and wine, mustard, pickles…But why not cheese paired with another cheese?” and goes on to praise Alpencheddar’s advancement of this theory:  it does not taste like a blend of Raclette and Cheddar. Rather, it tastes like Raclette, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 Cheddar. There's a discernible moment mid-palate where the flavor profile shifts, like an everlasting gobstopper of cheese. It's truly fascinating and something I encourage everyone to scope out.”

Frolic photo credit Aliza Eliazarov

As befits a two-cheese amalgam (Monger mongrel?), Alpencheddar is also a top pick from a second Cheese Prof panelist, Gillian Dana, head buyer at Curds & Co. in Brookline, Massachusetts. Dana further fangirls for Frolic  from Vermont’s Orb Weaver, which she describes as a “smaller format cousin of Tallegio, which is my personal favorite cheese.” The 1.25 lb. squares have an orangey brick-wall textured rind that yields to an eye-dotted paste for a visually dazzling contrast.

Flora photo credit Capriole Goat Cheese

And Dana can’t resist a further shout-out for Capriole Goat Farm’s Flora “I am in love with everything I buy from Capriole…but the Flora has this new essence that is so pure, so goaty (yet not terrifyingly tangy), chalky, and wonderful. I literally want to eat this by itself because I don’t want anything disrupting the wonderful balance.

Pitchfork Cheddar photo credit Trethowan Brothers

Sean Hartwig, the specialty foods manager at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan points out a pair of new spins on familiar favorites. Of Pitchfork Cheddar from Trethowan’s Dairy in Somerset, England, he notes:  “The cheese and anticipation have been a few years in the works.  We received our first wheel mid-pandemic and the staff loves the doughy paste and clean, fermented cream and veggie flavors. For years we have had the big three British clothbound raw milk cheddars, and now we can add a fourth jewel.”

Cervelle de Canut photo credit Zingerman’s

From England, Hartwig turns his eye to France for a final New Year newbie:

Zingerman’s own version of the Lyonnais cheese course staple: Cervelle de Canut a spread that traditionally incorporates fromage blanc with chives, shallots, olive oil and vinegar but, in its Ann Arbor edition is made with local Michigan goat cheese. Its one of the most delicious, offensively named concoctions you’ll ever eat: The name for this tasty shmear means “brain of the silkweaver”, indicating the ancient Lyon elites’ disdain for the manual laborers who worked for them. Perhaps a rechristening is appropriate for modern times: Cervelle de MAGA, perhaps?