Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 15, 2018)
NOVEMBER 15, 2018 // 3 SCRATCHPAD A fresh look at cheese By ERICK BENGEL COAST WEEKEND C AMI KREIDER PHOTO Features Editor Erick Bengel with cheese. Behold the power. coast INSIDE THIS ISSUE weekend arts & entertainment 2 THE ARTS Felted art CALENDAR COORDINATOR REBECCA HERREN CONTRIBUTORS KATHERINE LACAZE NANCY McCARTHY JONATHAN WILLIAMS Woolly creations on view at Cannon Beach museum COASTAL LIFE 4 Gone fishing 7 Festival of Trees 8 COAST WEEKEND EDITOR ERICK BENGEL Cannon Beach author’s new book recalls dory fleet CHRISTMAS CHEER Providence event launches holiday season in Seaside FEATURE Follow the Yellow Brick Road TO SUBMIT AN ITEM FURTHER ENJOYMENT CROSSWORD ...............................6 SEE + DO ............................. 10, 11 CW MARKETPLACE................. 15 New items for publication consideration must be submitted by 10 a.m. Tuesday, one week and two days before publication. Phone: 503.325.3211 Ext. 217 or 800.781.3211 Fax: 503.325.6573 E-mail: editor@coastweekend.com Address: P.O.Box 210 • 949 Exchange St. Astoria, OR 97103 ‘Wizard of Oz’ opens Nov. 16 at Coaster Theatre MUSIC CALENDAR ....................5 To advertise in Coast Weekend, call 503-325-3211 or contact your local sales representative. © 2018 COAST WEEKEND Find it all online! CoastWeekend.com features full calendar listings, keyword search and easy sharing on social media. Coast Weekend is published every Thursday by the EO Media Group, all rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced without consent of the publisher. Coast Weekend appears weekly in The Daily Astorian and the Chinook Observer. heese and I have a complicated history. I was 19, sitting at a booth in a campus food court across from an ex- change student from France, running my mouth a bit too much, perhaps, but somehow convincing myself she found my pimply American charm irresistible. The conversation turned to cheese. I don’t recall how we got there, but once we arrived, there was no turning back. Cheese is important to me, she said. Me, too, I replied. See how much we have in common?? Look at us, having this meeting of minds, bridging the cultural gap, turning cheese — cheese! — into a viable topic of conversation. What shall we name our children? She asked what kind of cheese I liked. I hadn’t counted on this level of depth. “Uh, string cheese,” I said. That’s specif- ic enough, right? The look on her face was unmistakable: I’d either just said something extremely witty, or the opposite. I asked what kind of cheese she enjoys. When she uttered the word “Camem- bert” in her worldly accent, I started to panic. Had I an- swered wrong just now? But … I mean … who doesn’t like string cheese? That was our last con- versation, about cheese or anything else. If only I’d taken Marc Bates’ cheese tasting and appreciation class, which he recently held at Cannon Beach’s Tolovana Hall in partnership with Tolovana Arts Colony. I could have ERICK BENGEL PHOTO Marc Bates, aka ‘The Cheese Guy,’ leads a night of cheese tast- ing and appreciation at Tolovana Hall. followed up with: “Ah, but string cheese is nothing to snicker at. A pasta filata cheese in the same family as mozzarella, it’s an example of a hard cheese cooked at low temperatures, then stretched and cured, sometimes for months. So there.” Basic cheese knowledge, like cheese itself, is some- thing you think you can live without — but when you need it, it’s the most import- ant thing to have handy. And, also like cheese, no matter how much you have, you can always have more. Bates, a cheesemaker and World Cheese Championship judge, is known as “The Cheese Guy.” At most cheese com- petitions, Bates and other judges begin at 100 points, the maximum amount, then dock points based on aroma, flavor, texture and body, appearance and rind devel- opment. “Most of what we do is, we take points off,” he said. As my tablemate noted, it’s as if cheese judges begin with a perfect cheese in mind that humans can only screw up in the real world. We mortals can merely pro- duce inferior copies of some Platonic form of Cheese. But cheese takes so many forms that to speak of “cheese” generically is almost to betray one’s ignorance. Before us were plates of medium cheddars, then plates of fresh cheeses (Chevre and Halloumi), heat- and acid-precipitated cheeses (Paneer), soft rip- ened cheese (Beach Bleu), semi-hard cheese (Boer- encase) and hard cheeses (Provolone, Reading and Cougar Gold). I’d hoped that in the years since my encounter with that exchange student my taste had matured like the hard nugget of 10-year- old Cougar Gold — refined, cultured, a little funky. But as Bates analyzed the cheese samples — noting acidity up front, bitter after- tastes and undertones I failed to pick up on — I realized I still have a dull and impa- tient palate. Deep down, the starving student in me still values quantity over quality. Not content with appreciating the cheese in front of me, I always want to appreciate more cheese. All the cheese. CW
