Holiday Cheese Course Gift Box

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

We ship thousands of loaves every year to bread lovers nationwide.

Our artisan bread is baked down the road from us at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. We ship bread using two business day service – nothing slower. Our bread doesn’t have any preservatives, so we use expedited shipping to help ensure it arrives in great condition.

The bread will last on the counter for a few days in its Zingerman’s bread bag.

It does not need to be refrigerated – in fact, we recommend you avoid the fridge! Refrigeration will wreak havoc on the texture.

If you want to keep the bread for more than a few days your best bet is to freeze it.

Double bag the loaf—or part of it—in plastic and freeze for up to three months.

All of our full-flavored breads are completely baked all the way so reheating is not necessary. 

You can eat the bread right out of the bag (ripping pieces or cutting slices – no judgment here). If it seems a little hard or dry, that’s because the thick, crisp crust is meant to protect the bread. Just like the rind on a natural cheese, real bread has very real crust to protect the inside of the loaf from drying out.

We only suggest that the bread will give you the “just out of the oven” experience… if you reheat it in the oven.

For a warm crackly crust and a soft, chewy crumb, we suggest putting your loaf (whole, half, or part) in a 350 degree oven for approximately 15-20 minutes. If you’re pulling bread out of the freezer, let it defrost for about 30 minutes before throwing it in the oven.

Tucked deep into the green, rolling hills of Vermont’s northeast corner is America’s most groundbreaking cheesemaker—literally. Fifteen years ago, the team at Jasper Hill Farm spent 10 weeks blasting into a hillside to build cheese aging cellars.

Today some of the best cheeses made in America—including Bayley Hazen—spend months maturing in those cellars.

Jasper Hill Farm was started to put Vermont cheese on the map.

Before brothers Andy and Mateo Kehler broke ground on their cellars, they were dairy farmers and cheesemakers. They started Jasper Hill Farm in 2003 with a herd of 15 Ayrshire cows. From the beginning, though, their goal wasn’t just to make a few locally-sold cheeses. They wanted to revitalize the Vermont dairy industry and put Vermont cheese on the national—and international—map. Today the farm has grown to include a herd of about 45 cows that spend their lives out on pasture as the seasons allow. Right next to the barn is the creamery, where every day they churn out a few cheeses using the milk of their own herd. And about a two-minute walk down a dirt lane, you find the cellars.

The cellars set Jasper Hill apart from other cheesemakers in the US.

The cellars at Jasper Hill are a set of seven underground vaults filled with wooden shelves holding thousands of wheels of cheese. The cellars are unique for a couple reasons. First, they’re great for cheese. Being underground, the cellars naturally maintain consistently cool, humid conditions across the year, no matter what the weather is like outside. Those cool, humid spaces allow cheese to mature slowly and develop huge, complex flavors. It’s a system that’s not uncommon in Europe—notably at places like Fort St. Antoine in eastern France where our Comté matures. In America specialized underground cheese caves are pretty rare. Jasper Hill’s cellars even go a step further than Fort St. Antoine. At the fort, there’s only one cheese and the conditions in the entire space are roughly the same. At the Jasper Hill cellars, each of the seven vaults is calibrated slightly differently. Having slightly different conditions allows for maturing more different cheeses—at any given time, there are roughly a dozen or so different cheeses in the Jasper Hill cellars. The differing conditions allow the cellarmasters to rotate the cheeses from one vault to another as they age so that they’re always in the ideal environment.

The second, and even more remarkable, thing about the cellars is that Andy and Mateo don’t just age their own cheeses there. They also partner with local cheesemakers to mature their cheeses, too. In many cases, Jasper Hill then helps to market and sell those cheeses across the country. In a world that’s so torn these days by competition, the collaboration and community fostered at the Jasper Hill cellars is refreshing.

Bayley Hazen was one of the first cheeses made at Jasper Hill.

It’s a raw milk blue cheese with a natural rind. Bayley Hazen is made daily with unpasteurized milk from the Jasper Hill cows. From the milking parlor, the milk travels just a few hundred yards to get to the cheesemaking room. Jasper Hill might have the prettiest cheesemaking room I’ve ever visited. While the inside is all white and stainless steel much like most cheesemakers, the room is awash in natural light that pours in through a half dozen or so huge picture windows that look out over unbelievably picturesque grassy, sloping fields that give way to mountains on the horizon.

The baby wheels of Bayley Hazen spend two days at the creamery before they’re carted down the lane to the cellars. When the wheels are five days old, they’re pierced to help with mold development. The piercing doesn’t inject the cheese with mold. The Penicillium Roqueforti cultures are added to the milk while the cheese is being made. Piercing the wheels with long needles allows oxygen to get inside, which helps the mold spores develop into the blue-green veins that lace across the interior of the cheese. The wheels then age for about three months under the careful attention of the cellar masters who flip the wheels, pat them down, and move them from one vault to another to ensure they mature evenly.

Bayley Hazen is the most approachable blue cheese I know.

It has sweet, well-rounded flavors without the bitterness and pungency that some people find off-putting in blue cheese. The texture is rich, buttery, chocolatey. It’s a great choice on a burger or in a salad, either crumbled on top or whipped into a blue cheese dressing.

I used to joke that The Netherlands only had one cheese: Gouda. Gouda in endless varieties, gouda with endless wardrobe changes. Gouda aged one year. Two years. Four years. Gouda with red wax. Gouda with black wax. To me, Dutch gouda was an enjoyable cheese, but monotonous, dull. It never got me excited. It never had me reaching for more.

Then I met Betty Koster.

Betty and her husband Martin founded the cheese shop Fromagerie L’amuse in Amsterdam in 1989. The name belied its confidence in its home country. This was a shop of fine imported cheeses—many of them French—alongside some good-enough Dutch ones. That soon changed. Betty began traveling across the country, meeting cheesemakers and agers. She took chances on small Dutch cheesemakers. She worked with cheese agers who were willing to experiment with different lengths of aging, different temperatures, different environments.

By the time I met Betty she’d been developing her stable of great Dutch cheeses for almost two decades. She’d become an icon in The Netherlands. She had gone from cold-calling cheesemakers to talk about the cheese she just bought to driving to farmers across the country and seeing them make cheese firsthand. She got to know the person behind the cheese, something no other shop or exporter did at the time. Before that the Dutch farmers and cheesemakers were unknown. They made cheese in anonymity, which, in the food world, is never a recipe for excellence. Any time a food is made without recognition it is usually made for cost savings, for profit—not for flavor.

Today, her shop is the most copied, revered, sought-after and examined vessel of Dutch cheese in the country.

When you visit you’ll see a glowing wall of waxed wheels of gouda behind the case. It’s still a gouda-centric cheese business. But the diversity in the goudas is shocking. From soft, sweet, young goudas to crystalline, caramelized aged ones. From sheep’s milk goudas from flocks grazed on seaside grass island, to goat’s milk goudas that taste like milkshakes.

Many Americans I know admiringly refer to Betty as the Julia Child of Dutch cheese. She’s larger than life, expressive, immediately approachable, funny, and knows her topic inside and out. The cheeses she brings to America have a big personality, just like her. The cheeses she finds, the way she chooses to age them — they are exciting. They will have you reaching for more.

Three exciting goudas from L’amuse

L’amuse Signature is Betty’s house gouda. She’s put her mark on every stage of it, especially the aging, which is done at higher-than-usual temperatures to give the cheese both crystalline crunch and creaminess. These two coveted cheese features are rarely found together.

Brabander is a goat’s milk gouda that reminds me of a milkshake. It’s so easy to eat it’s absurd.

Wilde Weide is one of the crown jewels of Betty’s Dutch cheese roster. It’s a gouda, true, but calling it just a gouda is like saying a Ferrari is just a car. Made organically on a 300 year old farm, its flavors are floral, bourbon rich, stunning.