I’m coming in late here, but October is American Cheese Month! I guess I haven’t written about it yet because I feel like we celebrate cheeses from the US every day! As we should! The number of small-production, carefully made, and heartily loved American cheeses has expanded over the past few decades, which is lucky for us. We live near a cheese mecca, Vermont, but New England in general has its fair share of excellent options. Soooo let’s chat about a couple New England cheeses in honor of American Cheese month and in honor of them being so good.

One of my current favorites is the bright, oozy sheep’s milk cheese called Summer Snow (which is coming to the end of its season, so let’s celebrate it now). Gari and Mark Fischer started making cheese over 15 years ago using milk from their herd of East Friesian dairy sheep in Weston, Vermont. We still don’t see too many soft sheep’s milk cheeses coming from the US because dairy sheep were not imported to America until the early 1990s! This young industry is growing, but I’m guessing it will still take a while before American sheep’s milk cheeses become anywhere near as common as American goat’s milk cheeses. In the meantime, though we have tastes sheepies like Summer Snow which is lemony, creamy, and rich, a perfect cheese for the end of the summer season. It goes just as well with a glass of chilled French rosé as it does a cup of hot cider topped with whipped cream and caramel.

Another cheese that has really been tickling my fancy recently is Tobasi from Cricket Creek Farm in Williamstown, MA. Tobasi is in this wonderful place in its aging where it tastes like butter and pine trees with lasting flavors of bacon and peanut butter. Add some jam and Elvis would have loved it! Add some jam and I think we all would love it. The cow’s milk cheese is pudgy at room temperature, and melts beautifully on a pizza or a piece of toast.

Is your mouth watering, because just writing about these cheeses makes me HUNGRY. And there are many more wonderful New England and American cheeses I could have mentioned! So cheers to our cheeses, to our cheesemakers, to our farmers, for giving us such tasty things to eat!

For the love of Summer Snow in October,

Kiri