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.
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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