The Secret Ingredient: Cheese

Jenn de la Vega (aka “randwiches” as she’ll explain in this interview) is the rare person who can mix opulent creativity with meticulous organization, enthusiasm with discernment, and who blends “high-end” with “low-end” cooking masterfully to create food and recipes that are precise and approachable and very individual all at the same time. I remember becoming aware of her when some of my friends came over to my house straight from her make-your-own-crunchwrap party a few blocks away, and thinking, I need to be friends with this person. We became friends soon after, but our relationship was really cemented through the Covid-era love language of treats delivered to one another’s doorsteps, checking in on each other from six feet away.

Jenn knows a huge amount about cheese (so much that I had to cut out whole fascinating anecdotes about cheddar and her aesthetic approach to cheeseboard design, or this newsletter would be even longer). She told me about the cultural changes in American cheese that she’s excited about, the short-season “Christmas cheeses” that she springs for at this time of year, a bunch of easy ways to use both fancy and cheap cheese, and her history through the cheese world, from “lovingly patting” rounds as an affinage intern for Murray’s Cheese Shop to judging for the Specialty Food Association.

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Jenn: So, what do you think when you when you hear the words American cheese?

Kate: I mean, deli slices.

Yeah, the bright yellow deli slices. But American cheese is actually much larger than that these days. An increasing pressure and price in European cheeses has driven this really interesting movement of American cheese. Did you know there's an American Cheese Society? There's a whole association of people who write certifications so that you can speak about, sell cheese, and source cheese. So there’s all this programming to help develop and further what American cheese is. They also advocate for changing archaic laws. We have this import law that cheese has to be older than 60 days to be imported to the US. And it sucks because there's a lot of really wonderful fresh-style cheese that needs to be air-shipped and it ends up being more expensive. So there's a whole lot that we're missing out on because of the rule.

But it’s sort of forced our country's hand. These days you can go driving in the countryside and find small-batch micro-dairies that are creating the most interesting biologically diverse cheeses in the country. I really love Bohemian Creamery, which is in Northern California. They do goat, cow, and buffalo and it’s all small batch. It’s one of those dairies I discovered on the side of the road. I was like, Hey, pull over. Let’s go visit those goats. And their cheeses are delicious, and just beautiful, unlike any other cheeses I’ve had. I know they’re served in a restaurant in San Francisco called Lazy Bear, but you can't just order them as a single person, you have to go to the place. It's literally just a counter. You walk in and there's someone there and you can point and look at all the cheeses and try them before you buy them. And I think that's such a special experience to see where the cheese is made and smell the same environment, because a lot of the environment and terroir, you know, the wine term, actually applies to cheese as well. It has this sense of place, which is really beautiful.

A general thing I like about cheese is that it’s seasonal. When we’re milking animals, they eat different things throughout the year and a spring cheese will be pretty different from a winter cheese. Winter tends to be richer and tends to signal the herd change in diet, from pasture to dried hay and indoor feeding. And since we're heading into the holiday season, there's a class of cheeses I call Christmas cheeses because once a year I will splurge and buy on the pricier side and it’s like my Cheesemas gift to myself. And those cheeses are available in short season. They're also very highly sought after. But they're really fun to prepare.

So a fancy thing to do with cheese is, you grab a goey-rind cheese — like Merry Goat Round, which is a goat breed that’s very short season. Cayuga Blue from Lively Run is a seasonal goat. Rogue River Blue cheese. Rush Creek Reserve is another one. One from France is Vacherin Mont d’Or. Or even the Harbison from Jasper Hill. But you can slice the top off and it’s like your own personal fondue at room temperature. Or if it's not liquid at room temperature, you can heat it up in the oven in a ramekin and use that as your own personal fondue. Just dip it, with boiled potatoes or crudite. You can also cut the top off, sprinkle some sugar and then brûlée it like you would a creme brûlée and it gets bubbly and cool. But instead of being a creamy sweet dessert underneath, it's more of a savory grassy mushroomy sort of flavor.

K: Aren’t cheeses aged for awhile, so why would winter ones be ready in the winter? Or are these ones that tend to have shorter aging?

Some of the ones I mention are a couple weeks only or a month, so if milked in the fall it’ll be ready by now. They’re not hard cheeses, which take months. Those are made in winter and rolled down the Swiss hills in the spring.

K: So if you’re someone looking for cool short-season cheeses for the holidays, your best bet would be to go for the soft gooey stuff?

Yeah!

K: Can you talk about how you came to know so much about cheese?

It goes back to when I first moved to New York and I was working in the music industry and getting burnt out on it. I started inviting people to my house, like my coworkers and my music friends, for Grilled Cheese Sunday, so we could have some comfort food and, you know, gripe about our industry woes. I kept it consistent and I did it for 3 years. I really pushed the definition of what a grilled cheese is. I would do like a sweet brioche with a goat cheese brûlée. Or a sweet wheat grilled cheese with Wensleydale cranberries, served with a wild rice soup with parsley and onion, so it was a very cozy cold weather meal. I’ve done queso de mano, which is a Spanish cheese, with pico de gallo — sort of a commentary on Spanish and Latin relations. But that one was a tartine, it was a triangle of bread with melted cheese and pico de gallo on top, so it was kind of a bread nacho. I was really not just thinking about the different kinds of cheese but different kinds of sandwiches, which gave rise to my Instagram and Twitter handle all over the Internet, which is “random sandwiches,” or randwiches for short. So the story of my entire culinary practice was trying to make a grilled cheese every Sunday.

At first, I was going to the grocery store and buying every cheese. And then I started looking at international grocery stores. And then I hit a wall of my knowledge, like, I can't possibly keep coming up with new grilled cheese combinations if I don't learn more, and so I discovered Murray's Cheese Shop. I started volunteering at Murray’s and I became an affinage intern, which was in the aging room underneath the shop. It was my job to babysit different caves of cheese and understand how they age and how to treat them. They all have different humidity levels, different handling, some have to be brined, some have to be turned over periodically and patted very lovingly. But I learned a lot down there. I found out I had a mold allergy, which really crushed my dreams of ever working at a dairy full time. But it wasn’t over. I transferred to the education department. I would volunteer for maybe two classes a week for five years. I really took notes, I asked questions. I bought one of every cheese that had come through the classroom so that I could keep my knowledge base fresh. And so from there every Sunday got fancier and fancier.

We did classes where you would take a tour of the cave and then learn about what affinage is. So you would try the same cheese but at different ages so that you understand what mold does and how skin is formed and all that. Other classes were more hands on like mozzerella making — which I encourage everyone to try, there are kits now online, you can get them and do it at home which is really exciting. It's very rewarding to learn how to make pasta filata, which is the entire class of mozzarella and handpulled cheeses from Italy. And we also did pairings classes with wine. Cheese and beer. They even did cheese and whiskey. They also now have a class with cheese and kimchi. So fermented foods are another avenue that you can explore when pairing with cheeses and that really helps when you're making sandwiches.

I think that cheese is a lot like my culinary practice, which is high and low. I think we can exist in both of these places. Like we can make a lot of cool things happen with lower end or lower quality or low cost. Here’s a simple way of preparing cheese: get any store bought cheddar cubed, and then dip one side in paprika. It's instantly smoky and it's like having a sandwich without the bread. So I like to have it with pepperoncini.

Something else that I do regularly just for myself and for a quick entertaining trick is I do this fridge clean out based on the idea of fromage fort, which is mixed blended cheeses, and it’s a very easy recipe. You take any leftover cheese ends and you blend them up in a food processor, add a couple splashes of wine and then one or two (well, for me three or four) cloves of garlic, and you blend it up and it becomes your own little customized cheese blend. And there are different versions of fromage fort — like beer cheese is one, so instead of using wine you would switch out beer. So using that knowledge of what pairs well together, you can make cool new sauces. You can keep it really tight, using less liquid in the mix to make it more of a pâté or spreadable situation, or you can add more liquid to make it a saucy thing that can be melted further, and served with potatoes or chips or even used as a pasta sauce.

K: I wanted to ask you about this “high and low” aspect, because to me, so much of the cheese world feels sort of exclusive, or like, classist. How has that been for you?

Yeah, I definitely have experienced that. To be honest with you, I'm one of the few people of color that participates in judging cheese. So it did feel like a club at first. But thanks to a few people who have read my work and understand how much I love cheese, I've been invited to judge Specialty Food Association categories of cheese, as well as the Cheesemongers Invitational. Judging and being an underrepresented voice in the room, it really means a lot. It brings a lot of perspective to the other judges about, you know, how did your palate get formed and how do we taste things differently? And what's awesome is that we do agree on the cheeses that are, like, hands down delicious. And then we can talk further about the nuances of what makes them delicious. It's really interesting, creating rubrics and trying to align ourselves on what makes a good cheese, and that definition is changing. It's cool to be part of the conversation.

K: How is that definition changing?

I think that when new flavors are being introduced, we need to create more vocabulary about how they play with other elements. Like, pairings are subjective. And so many people have different proclivities and preferences. There's this discussion period in the judging and that's where a lot of these stories come out. Like, for example, if there is a thistle rennet cheese, those tend to be a little bitter. And somebody says, I didn't like the taste of it. And then someone else could say, But did you know it has this specific ingredient that makes it taste like that? So the discussion part of it is really important and could be deeper, it could be longer, but you know, we only have so much time. But yeah, it’s an interesting place to be, because it’s very loud that there are like three people of color in the room. I do think we should invite more open conversations about, Why aren't there more people of color in these rooms? Why are they staying away from the industry and if they aren't, how can we find them?

K: I've been thinking a lot about how people's palates get formed, because it's such an inside-outside process. I really love for people to discover for themselves what tastes good to them. But there's all kinds of things around them that have created those tastes. Were you always into food growing up? Was it something that you always paid a lot of attention to?

So I was and am very susceptible to advertising. So every 90s convenience food I wanted and got. I think that’s where a lot of the “low” cooking that I do comes from, it really stuck with me. It's really part of my identity. I try to recreate a lot of that food of that time, with new ingredients in 2022. But I didn’t like food, I didn’t like mealtime for some reason. The only real vegetables that I ate were carrots and iceberg lettuce drenched in ranch dressing. The real change happened in college. I’d get invited to potlucks and it's rude to not bring a dish. So I did some Googling, watched a lot of Food Network, and really fell headfirst into it because I wanted to have pride in the things that I was bringing to people's houses.

It's a funny phenomenon, but when I try to cook for myself, I get so distracted that I tend to burn the food. For other people, I pull out all the stops. I'm like, Oh, I just want you to try this thing that I've been working on. I just love to make things for other people. And I feel very happy when other people make things for me. I keep bumping into this notion of people being afraid to cook for me, my friends get worried, like, I’m not good enough, or You’re a professional chef. But I’m so happy that you even thought to cook for me, like I really cherish it so much. If you want me to tell you, How can I make this better next time? I will, but I won't outright tell you that this was dry or it got burnt because that's not what it's about. It's about building that connection and being excited about things you’re going to cook for other people.

What I’m Cooking

Lemon Ginger Turmeric Snickerdoodles

These are dramatic celebration cookies, colored bright yellow by their turmeric-sugar coating, and with the strong flavors of lemon and ginger to make them stand out from regular sugar cookies. They’re very soft and a little chewy, but you can make them fluffier and more cake-like if that’s how you prefer snickerdoodles.

If you want to add them to your holiday gift box, become a paid subscriber and get the recipe! It’s like a triple gift: you get new recipes every Friday, your friends and family get to eat cool treats, and I get a nice email that tells me someone wants to support my work!

Lemon Ginger Turmeric Snickerdoodles