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A three-month cheddar and a three-year cheddar are technically the same cheese in the same way that a caterpillar and a butterfly are technically the same insect. Time does extraordinary things inside a cheese wheel, and food scientists are only now beginning to map the full strangeness of the transformation. Prepare to have your mind — and your palate — thoroughly expanded.
Everyone knows Vermont makes great cheese. Congratulations, you've read a magazine. But America's most thrilling curd country is hiding in plain sight — in the hollows of Appalachia, the high desert of New Mexico, and the fog-drenched coast of Northern California. Pack a cooler, gas up the car, and let CheeseZoo be your very weird, very delicious GPS.
Forget the sad winery tour where someone hands you a cracker and calls it an experience. America's artisan creameries are quietly becoming some of the most fascinating — and frankly most delicious — destinations in experiential food travel. Here are eight producers doing something genuinely worth rerouting your GPS for.
Most cheesemakers buy their bacterial cultures from a catalog, the same way you'd order office supplies. A growing group of American producers is doing something far stranger and more interesting: letting whatever microbes live in their milk, their caves, and their hands do the work instead. The results are unpredictable, occasionally alarming, and often extraordinary.
So you've been burned before. Maybe it was a bold blue at a dinner party, or a washed-rind that smelled suspiciously like your gym bag. We get it. But here at CheeseZoo, we believe no cheese lover should be left behind — including the ones currently hiding behind the brie. This is your intervention, and it smells amazing.
Terroir — that untranslatable French concept meaning a food or drink tastes like the specific place it came from — isn't just for wine anymore. American cheesemakers from the Pacific Coast to the Great Lakes are deliberately crafting cheeses that taste like their particular patch of earth, their local weather, their specific grass. This is the story of how geography ends up on your cracker.