Victoria Potts

Company: Grass Roots Gourmet - owner

http://www.midtownglobalmarket.org/?q=shopping/groceries/6758

Fromager philosophy:

The cheese does not stand alone - it likes company. And the best company is the home town crowd. Whether you're in Paris or Peoria (or the TC), artisan cheese is happiest with other local product raised in the same soil and climate.

Favorite everyday cheese: Donnay Chever (Kimball, MN): sets the bar for fresh flavor and silky texture. Perfect for schmeering on a bagel, blobbing on a pizza, slicing on a salad, drizzling with honey or preserves for dessert.

Most decadent cheese: Bent River (Mankato, MN): aromatic, gooey and ... just naughty. I get a big kick watching customers pick up this cheese, take a whiff, get this really goofy look on their face, and then this really sheepish look when I ask "Can I help you?"

Best holiday cheese: Northern Lights Blue (St. Paul, MN): I've had customers who "hate" blues go cross eyed over this one. Beautiful balance of earthy and fresh cream flavors, plays very well with other celebration foods year round: spiced nuts at Christmas, spring onions, July 4th burgers, autumn apples & pears.

Greatest cheese of all time: Breakfast Cheese (Petaluma, CA). A rind-washed cow milk cheese, craggy and inedible on the outside, slurpy and downright barny at the core. My mom used to pick it up at a funky dairy farm on the way to our funky family vacations. We all have our madeleine - Breakfast Cheese is mine.

Vicki's Cheese Pairings With Crispin Cider

Light: strikes me as tart but delicate. My favorite pairings with Lite are:

• Chevre (Donnay Dairy, Kimbal, MN) topped with a dab of Ginger-Pear preserves (Lucille's Kitchen Garden, St Paul, MN): the cheese and cider have a nice interplay of fresh and tangy flavors, the preserves add a little spice and fruit to keep the whole thing from puckering your tongue

• Prairie Breeze (Milton Creamery, Milton, IA): technically a cheddar, but really just a classic Heartland farmstead table cheese - direct but well-behaved pasture flavor, works beautifully with the refreshing qualities of the cider. Produced by an Amish co-op, the cheese maker just turned 18 (we're very proud of him).

• Cranberry Summer Sausage (Prairie Pride, Mankato, MN): LOTS of cranberries in the sausage, make a nice sweet-tart complement to the cider - not to mention the classic affinity between pork and apples (the pork seems to accentuate the apple in the cider).

• Smoked Almonds (Barsy's Almonds, Minneapolis, MN): Barsy's take care to retain the basic flavor of the nut in their roasting, so the smoke flavor kicks in as a nice finish - the first and most important taste you get is the affinity between almonds and apples. Again, this is a case where the complement (the almond) brings out the apple flavor in the cider.

Brut: strikes me as dry but not tart, mild-to-medium apple flavor. My favorite pairings with Brut are:

• Mellage (Carr Valley Cheese, La Valle, WI): a fairly miraculous cheese that combines cow, goat and sheep milk. Under the right conditions, you can taste the distinct flavor of all three milks - Crispin Brut is one of those conditions: the apple flavor is strong enough to enhance all three milks individually, not so strong that it competes with any.

• Apple Smoked Cheddar (Carr Valley Cheese, La Valle, WI): a medium white cheddar very lightly smoked with fruit wood, then hand rubbed with a deeply flavored smoked paprika. The balance of smoked flavors in the cheese is special on its own, but the Brut marries the two at a crazy-good level.

• La Rossa Proscuitto (La Quercia, Norwalk, IA): buttery, acorn-y, a little more porky, a little less salty than most imported proscuittos. Brut seems to me the perfect complement: I taste apple in the cider like I taste pork in the proscuitto and the two flavors really talk. Also, the cider's just dry enough cut the buttery quality of the meat, which is lovely but can get a bit gunky with richer bevvies.

• Dried Apple Chips (Ames Farm, Watertown, MN): these chips have clear apple flavor like Brut, crisp texture like potato chips - this pairing is all about exploring how mouth feel affects you experience of aplle flavor. May thru Oct, spread your apple chips with Granite Ridge (slightly aged goat cheese, seasonal specialty at Donnay Dairy, Kimball, MN) - THE best.

Original: strikes me as very apple-y, a little musky like wind falls. My favorite pairings with Original Crispin are:

• Marieke Fenugreek Gouda (Holland's Farm, Thorp, WI): buttery, nutty flavors of classic Dutch-style Gouda with a mind-blowing maple-y/butterscotch-y finish; works magic with the slightly musky flavor of the cider

• Dante (Wisconsin Sheep Dairy Co-op, Strum, WI): classic medium sharp and salty bite of an aged cheese with the slightly earthy (mushroomy) flavors of sheep milk - exceptional counterpoint to a fruity-earthy cider.

• Smoked Trout - plain or maple (Star Prairie Trout Farm, Star Prairie, WI): When I order trout from Star Prairie, that fish is still swimming. The fish is just fresh but trouty enough, Crispin's Original is just fresh and fruity enough - this is a particularly special local pairing.

• Hazelnuts (good luck finding them): we don't produce a lot of hazelnuts in this part of the country, but what we produce is stellar. If you can find them, lightly toasted hazelnuts would be THE perfect complement to Crispin Original and anything - trotters, head cheese, Kraft singles, I don't care. Local hazel nuts and local cider rock like oysters and champagne can only dream of.

Honey Crisp (man! this stuff is good!): strikes me as rich, mildly spicey, but there's still a very fresh, unprocessed flavor of apple. My favorite pairings with Honey Crisp are:

• Bent River (Alemar Cheese, Mankato, MN) topped with Cranberry-White Balsamic Chutney (Lucille's Kitchen, St. Paul, MN): a downright naughty cheese (gooey, full-flavored), paired with spicey-fruity pickle, paired with fragrant warm cider - all grown together in the same soil and climate. We're talking serious affinity.

• Northern Lights (Joe Sherman, St. Paul): great balance of earthy (think mushrooms) and mineral (think salty) and fresh, grassy milk. Blues and dessert wine are a classic European pairing: rich and funky. For my money, Northern Lights and Honey Crisp are the new classic from the Heartland: rich and fresh.

• Bison Summer Sausage (Big Woods Bison, Nerstrand, MN): bison and honey have two things in common that few other foods share: they're equally rich but clean in flavor. Bison sausage and Honey Crisp Cider are a match ordained in heaven. If you want to take it up to the next level, toss in:

• Pickled Beets (Angelica's Garden, Elmwood, WI) - organic, pricey, and worth every penny. Exquisitely compatible with Honey Crisp - clean, spicey, clean.

Published by Scott Tuffield