Hopeful I'd be able to find a fabulously fancy Irish cheese in honor of St Patrick's Day that fit our splurge budget? Nope. Irish cheeses just don't tend to fall in the expensive category, they tend to be the affordable sort of splurge. Therefore I decided to settle on a stellar Massachusetts cheese made by the smallest creamery one of my favorite cheese purveyors works with -- Carlisle Farmstead cheese / Ruggles Hill Creamery found at Fromaggio Essex (in the Essex Street Market down on the Lower East Side) and their Cambridge based sister shop, Fromaggio Kitchen. Clocking in at $40.96 per pound, this fits our splurge bill.
Carlisle Farmstead Cheese, now known as Ruggles Hill Creamery only has ten goats on their farm and the milk from those ten goats fuel the creation of their fabulous cheeses, here we have chosen Greta's Fair Haven, one of two raw goat's milk cheeses crafted on the farm. This is aged for at least sixty days, it is a tomme style firm cheese. With the short period of aging, the raw goat's milk flavor deepens and expands into an herbaceous, vegetal, barnyardy, earthy and nutty cheese that still maintains the light, crisp, citrus grassy notes of a classic raw goat's cheese. The perfect mixture of youth and age bottled into Greta's Fair Haven.
This is small production farmstead cheese done right and is worth the indulgence on those who appreciate the delicate terrior nuances and intricacies of what raw goat's milk has to offer.
Image courtesy of www.formaggiokitchen.com
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