Brussel Sprouts with Pancetta

Brussel sprouts (or Brussels sprouts — either spelling is OK), the little miniature cabbages that we love to hate, are in season. They're cheap, plentiful, and, popular opinion aside, pretty tasty. At the farmer’s market you can buy them right on the stalk, which is kind of fun. Go ahead and walk around like the Queen Mum with her weird vegetable scepter.

I cook them regularly. Usually some variation of this recipe. This week I had some of the new La Quercia pancetta, which is outstanding.

~ Brussel Sprouts with Pancetta ~
RECIPE

Chop the pancetta in small cubes, about a quarter inch on each side. Warm them on a low heat till they're translucent. They'll look otherworldly, like they're glowing from within.

Cut the base off the brussel sprouts and peel off the outside leaves. Cut them in half if they’re bigger than in an inch or so across. Add them to the pan with a couple pats of butter.

Brown them for a bit. Add chicken broth so it covers the bottom of the pan (water is a distant second as an option). Throw in a couple leaves of fresh herbs if you have them. I added some sage.

Put a lid on and let cook for a bit till they're as soft as you'd like. It can take a half an hour or more.I prefer a little al dente, just a little firm to the bite.

Taste and season with salt and pepper.

I had an ear of corn so I cut the kernels straight off the cob into the pan near the end. It adds a nice bit of sweetness, which is good if your dining partner thinks sprouts are a little too bitter on their own.

Finish them uncovered in a 375 degree oven if you’d like them crispy.

Ad the end, serve on a warm plate with a twist of black pepper and maybe a pinch of Marash pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

Ingredients
A pound or so of sprouts
A couple ounces of bacon (or pancetta)
A little bit of butter
A half cup or so of chicken broth
Salt, pepper

Optional
Fresh sage
Fresh corn
Marash pepper

London, final notes.

Over three quarters of the cheeses for sale on the counter at Neal's Yard Dairy's are "new" cheeses. That is, non-traditional cheeses that have been made for the first time in the last couple decades. That surprised me. I expected a lot more of the counter dedicated to old traditional cheeses like Stilton, Lancashire, Cheddar. Instead there are lots of cheeses I'd never heard of a few years ago, like Ogleshield, Cardo and -- my favorite name -- Cornish Yarg.

This mirrors what's happening in the USA. In the last five to ten years dozens and dozens of new cheese makers have started businesses. Other longstanding makers have become newly invigorated. In part I think some their strength is being derived from the weak dollar. European cheese costs a lot more than it did a few years ago. Next to a $35 per pound English Cheddar, American farmhouse cheese at $25 a pound looks like a relative bargain and more is certainly being sold because of price. But a lot of the success is thanks to hard work. When the dollar strengthens again we'll continue to have a much more diverse cheese landscape in America than we did before.

I think it's important to note that these cheeses might not have become great if it weren't for trade with Europe. There are simplistic arguments for local eating that miss out on the benefits everyone gets from trade. Because we can sell great cheese from Britain and Italy and elsewhere, because we developed a taste and awareness for this kind of cheese, because we created a market for greatness, we've built a foundation for great cheese to grow in America. U.S. farmers and entrepreneurs tasted, learned, and worked to make something as good as what Europe offered. Today a few American makers are creating cheese as good as you can eat anywhere. Imagine how much longer it would take if we had a closed market and we couldn't import these great cheeses to learn from? A bit of global trade helps local flavor.

I've added some photos from the trips to Montgomery's Cheddar and Linconlshire Poacher.

Thursday, Montgomery's Cheddar

Cheddar was born in Somerset county, in south western England. Unlike Stilton, which protected its name, cheddar's name got loose in the world. It has been used to brand hundreds of copycats. But they're like shades of the original, haunting the edges of the earth. Today there are only three farms making traditional cheddar. That is to say, cheddar from a herd of cows located on same farm where it's made, unpasteurized milk, traditional animal rennet, hand-formed in 25 kilo forms, wrapped in cloth, larded, aged at least twelve months. They are Keen's, Westcombe, Montgomery's. I visited Keen's and Montgomery's, our regular cheddar.

Some jargon. Cheddar is the name of a cheese and the name of a particular process that makes cheddar what it is. After the rennet creates curds and before the curds are milled there is cheddaring. The mass of curds — a big, rubbery, gelatinous blob — is cut in the vat, stacked, flipped and stacked some more. The stacked weight, sloped against the vat, stretches the curd. It also squeezes out whey and increases acidity. When everything is right, an hour or two later, the texture of the curd is like cooked chicken breast. They're also very tasty, some of the best cheese curds I've eaten. It was hard to stop nibbling on them.

Some trivia. Montgomery cheddar cows graze on a hill that most scholars agree was the location of Camelot. I asked Jamie Montgomery, the owner, if that's true. With typical British dryness he replied, "Yes. We own Camelot."

Photos of a cheddar as it ages.

Next stop: London.

Wednesday, Linconshire Poacher

Brothers Simon and Tim Jones run their family farm in Lincoln- shire, on the eastern edge of England, near the sea. The ocean is so close you can see it from the last cow barn. Besides pheasants and crows, gulls occasionally fly overhead.

Like many of the cheeses Neal's Yard Dairy sells, Poacher is relatively new to the world. A "new traditional cheese," as some like to call them. It has a lot in common with traditional English cheddar. The size, shape, color, and texture are similar. But it's made 350 miles east of the cheddar counties and it's got just enough other quirks to make it completely its own thing. Here it's pictured after it was washed, ready for boxing up and shipping out.

Simon, the agricultural college major, first started making Poacher in the early 1990's, about the same time that ZMO was born. Tim, his brother, the marketing and numbers guy, came on board in 1998, about the same time we started zingermans.com. Interesting symmetry there. We've been selling it at ZMO since 2006 or so, after our first visit to their farm. During that trip we tasted a great batch of thirty 45 lb cheeses -- a day's make -- and bought the whole lot.

We tasted about forty cheeses today, made on forty different days. There were a lot of good ones — it was hard to narrow it down! The finalists were all from 2007: March 21, April 27, May 30, July 20. Carlos, Grace and I settled on March 21, 2007. It's a savory-yet-sweet cheese with a full body that should last well into spring and summer of 2009. Look for it in late November.

Photos from Poacher.

Next top: Montgomery's Cheddar.

Tuesday, Stichelton.

When you arrive at the Stichelton cheese making operation at 7am, this is what you see. A twenty-five hundred liter tank of warm milk, just pumped a few hundred feet from the cow pen next door. The white stick on top is a paddle — for stirring by hand. Luckily there's not a lot of stirring to do. In fact, there's not a lot of anything to do. Stichelton is a cheese that takes a long time to make. Most of the time is spent waiting.

I keep saying Stichelton and you might be wondering "What is that?" Stichelton is the name cheese maker Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson of Neal's Yard Dairy (Joe's partner) have given to this cheese. In reality it's raw milk Stilton. They can't call it that in England since, there, proper Stilton can only be made from pasteurized milk (a rule that came into being a couple decades ago, though traditional Stilton had been made with raw milk for centuries).

This is Joe's third holiday season. (I say that because, like us, he thinks in terms of holidays. Stilton is the holiday cheese in Britain so he gets a big spike in orders then, too.) His cheeses are much better than they were in 2006, even better than 2007. He continually tests small changes to the recipe. The latest has been to use pre-ripened milk. He doesn't refrigerate the milk so its active cultures get a head start on making cheese. The results have been more interestingly flavored cheeses. Look for them in November.

Next stop: Licolnshire Poacher.

Monday, The Arches in London

I'm tasting and selecting cheese in England right now so I'll send some notes about what I'm learning.

Monday. Went to Neal's Yard Dairy's Arches, where they store their selected cheeses and pack them for shipping. They're named The Arches because they are actually Victorian brick arches under the London Bridge-to-Dover rail line. The train rumbles overhead every few minutes. We tasted dozens and dozens of cheeses over a few hours. The process, if you've been part of it is: Plug the cheese with an iron that removes a long pencil of cheese, take a bit with your fingers, chew, think, write down what you taste.

The left side of this board was in front of shelves of Doddington. That's a big maroon-rind cheese we've carried once before. Each date is a different "make" batch. There are different comments about the taste and texture. "Creamy." "Flat" "Dull" And my favorite: "Corky" I agreed with their taster about the one at the bottom made July, 20 2007. It haslots of flavor." Seven wheels available. Carlos reserved one. We might, too.

Next stop: Stichelton.

True North, Part Two

When Eric noticed we "86 a product because we prepped too many of one size and not enough of another" he was talking about chopped liver. We sold two sizes. Half pound and one pound. We sold out of one but had some of the other.

How can we apply the principles to chopped liver? Remember, True North is Make each product as needed, on demand.

True North is a direction, not a reachable goal. We can't make almost any product from scratch on demand. Take chopped chicken liver. Somewhere, sometime, a chicken was involved. It's unrealistic to grow a chicken each time a customer orders a half pound of chopped liver.

We head towards True North by shortening the time between demand and the make. How can we do that? Here are five ways.

1. Have all the ingredients ready. Make chopped liver from scratch after it's ordered.
2. Make the chopped liver in bulk. Portion it into the right size after it's ordered.
3. Make the chopped liver and portion it. Decide how much to make of each size by creating a marketplace with kanban cues. (The way we do it now.)
   
4. Make the chopped liver and portion it when a low level is reached.
5. Make the chopped liver according to a forecast.
   

These ways don't nearly exhaust all options. I just wanted to lay out five options that go from closer to True North to further away. No. 1 is closest. It has no premade inventory. The second option has a little more inventory. It's a little further away from True North. The third, even more inventory, even further away. By the time we reach No. 5 we have the most inventory and we're furthest away from True North.

So why not just head on up to True North as fast as we can? For one, it's difficult and causes lots of problems. Big ones, some of which we feel every day. I'll talk about those in a post soon.