Description

California travel expert Veronica Hill learns about artisan cheese at The Loft Cheese Gallery in Laguna Beach in this episode of "CaliforniaTravelTips."

Transcript

Good afternoon and welcome to the Montage Cheese Gallery. We’re here at the Loft. We have over a 100, 150 cheeses at any given time and we also have accompaniments and honeys. We have a little sub-honey gallery with about a100 different honeys from 38 to 40 different countries right now and different flavor profiles of the honey and the accouchements that we create accent all of the different cheeses that are in the gallery. We will come to each person’s table, listen to their flavor profile, their definite cheese experience and what they are looking for an experience and we will bring a cheese plate to them unique to their table. And a great cheese is one that has many different profiles jut a like a good wine, you don’t want a one note so to speak. Pairing these things, it is just—it comes to you when you taste the cheese. We had a beautiful—and it’s gorgeous, gorgeous French cheese up from the up from the Sovoie area and when you smell in this, oh I can smell it right through the wrapper even. It smells like saltine crackers. And it tastes like that too. And so what goes with saltine crackers? Chicken noodle soup, you know, so we took a mirepoix of carrots, onions, celery and so forth and dice it up a little bit and then put it with chicken stock, beautiful chicken stock; a little gelatin and then we put it with this. Every guest we serve it to and they put in their mouth, they go, “Oh my gosh, it’s like Thanksgiving.” And I go, “Yes” but the cheese is the predominant flavor. Blue cheese tends to love dark berries. We’ll put dark berries, maybe some honeycomb with it. It likes honey as well. People that aren’t so used to blue cheeses, we’ll tell them, try it with a little honey and we might match different honey flavors with the different blues and we’ll say try with it because it will soften it enough to take the bite off but still leave all those beautiful flavors of the blue so they can enjoy it and they become blue lovers kind of through the back door. We’ll do a beautiful goat’s milk cheese that has herbs on it. And a tarragon chevre from France that is called—and we have made a strawberry lavender reduction that will pick up on that. Well, I should say another one, beautiful goat’s milk from Texas called Hoja Santa. And it is wrapped in a hoja santa leaf which is like this big and they have taken it and they have dumped it in a plum brandy to keep it supple and they have wrapped the little chevre in it when we cut it, it tastes of sassafras or root beer. So, another thing that we do off of these beautiful red grapes, we make our own raisins and then we marinate them in vanilla cognac for months and when they put that together with that little chevre; beautiful, beautiful root beer float, just go on in your mouth. Our sommelier works right next to us and they know almost of much about cheeses as I do and we’ll go back and forth and will say, “Okay, if this great—is going to go with this, we’ve got some great you know, Chenin Blanc that is going to really show off those goat’s milk.” And they’ll say, “Do you have this in season right now?” And I’ll say, “Oh yes.” They are on ice wine or you know—with some of our sweeter honeys. We love pairing great pork with some of our stronger or maybe our you know great caramelized goudas here, our lovely pork with that. So, we work as a team as we do in just about every area in the Montage to bring the best experience to our best we can.