Helen Howarth is a woman who’s not afraid to use adjectives. Listen to her description of gruyere cheese: “tangy, caramel-y, luscious and divine.”
Perfect. I tried a bite of gruyere when I went to check out her new shop, Fromagio’s Artisan Cheese Spenard, this week.
This is Howarth’s second cheese shop in Anchorage. A place she describes as, “candy store for grown-ups.”
While I was there Howarth gave me a quick lesson on cheese: goat cheese is whiter in color and more tangy. Cows produce more milk and their cheese tends to be sweeter. Cheese made from sheep’s milk fall somewhere between cow and goat cheese and are a fattier cheese. There is even water buffalo cheese, which tastes kind of like cheese that uses cow’s milk.
Howarth handed me a chunk of Brillat Savarin, French Triple Cream. It was soft, almost white, it stuck to the butcher paper.
“It’s essentially butter on steroids,” Howarth said.
She told me to try and taste the different grasses the cows were feed, could I tell what time of the year they were milked?
Maybe I couldn’t on this trip but, that won’t stop me from trying again.
“Butter on Steroids”
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