As it is the week of the summer solstice and I am teaching a class on warm weather cheeses tomorrow, I thought for today's post, I'd give you a little preview of some of what I will discussing tomorrow and talk about how seasonality effects cheeses.
Cheese seasonality is linked primarily to the reproductive cycle of the animals (cows, goats, and sheep) and secondarily to weather and in turn the amount of daylight available and lastly, obviously what the animal eats will affect the flavors and tastes of their milk. Seasonality if you ask me really only comes into play more when discussing goat and sheep's milk cheeses, as cows produce milk year round. However, many artisanal cow dairies will only produce cheese when they think that their milk is in prime cheesemaking condition.
Obviously, cheese can only be made when the animals are lactating or have just given birth and are needing to feed their young. Sheep lactate for the shortest period of time, eight months. Goats lactate for ten months and cows can have milk all year round. Therefore, we can see that there are four months out of the year where there is no sheep milk and two months out of the year where there is no goat's milk, making cheese production at those times tougher. Now this is not to say that there is no goat or sheep's milk cheese in the winter months, cheesemakers have come up with alternative routes -- whether it is selling cheeses that have been aged or tinkering with the breeding cycles so some animals give birth in the spring and some in the winter. However those animals that give birth in the winter, do not have the best food to graze on changing the quality of their milk. Think of it this way -- yes you can get berries and peaches and cherries in winter months but are they as good as the bounty you find in the summer? Most certainly not! Just as with our fruit analogy, cheeses produced in winter months will taste very different than the same cheese in a summer month.
So are you curious what cheese to eat when?!!? This is just to give you an idea, I think you can figure it out for yourself!
Springtime months - Ricotta, really fresh fresh goat cheeses, young sheep's milk cheeses, certain cheeses like St. Pat's are only made in Springtime months and are fantastic. St Pat's is a creamy cheese that is wrapped in nettle leaves.
Summertime months - Semi-aged goat's and sheep's milk cheeses, fresh goat and sheep's milk cheeses, mozzarella and burrata, some cheeses that were made with last summer's milk and aged for the past year like Comte and of course bloomy rind sheep and cow's milk cheeses like camemberts.
Fall months - Washed rind cheeses that were made with spring time milk and aged and we see a second growth in the pastures after summer's drying out. This second growth enables extended production of cheeses into the late fall and early winter months.
Winter months - Blue veined cheeses that have been made with early spring milk and aged, same goes for firmer and harder cheeses that need aging to bring out their flavor profiles like Ossau-Iraty, Gruyeres, etc.
I hope you learned a little bit about what cheeses to eat at what times of year. It is definitely worth the experiment of trying one artisanal goat cheese in the height of summer and then trying the exact same cheese, if you can find it, in the middle of the winter, I guarantee you will think that you had two totally different cheeses.
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