| Thursday, March 20, 2008 |
13:28 - A little cheese and whynot
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I've been ordering sporadically from Murray's Cheese for some months now, after an article in AAA's Via magazine prompted me to look up Burrata di Andria and order some from whatever distant land would deliver some to me. Turns out that the place to go for such things is in Greenwich Village, which despite being of nationwide renown, seems to be unknown even to many locals.
I discovered this not through speculation or grapevinery, but first-hand. By which I mean that now that I'm in the general vicinity, and knowing that Murray's offers a regular schedule of classes in cheese, wine, bread, pizza, beer, and the various gastronomic combinations of any and all of these, and discovering that they'd added a class called "Chocolatiering 101" to the lineup, I figured it was time to make a pilgrimage.
The class was run by Alisha Lumea of CocoaVino, a local chocolate shop whose "Drunken Figs" are already featured front-and-center at Murray's. I came into the room and found a U-shaped aggregation of tables with about twenty place settings, in front of each of which was a glass of champagne and another of Merlot, a basket of fruity bread, some chunky unsalted butter, and a tray of four items that I'm told are part of every cheese tasting and class at Murray's: walnut halves, dried tart Montmorency cherries, dried apricots, and Marcona almonds in olive oil. (For the record, I am going to have to submit that the Marcona with one of the dried cherries is giving a run for its money to Blue Diamond Smokehouse + Dill Pickle as my favorite almond-based flavor combination of all time.)
They also passsed out dishes each bearing three small items: one of each of the two kinds of Persephone bonbons (a lemon-and-caramel one and a lavender one), and one of these weird fig truffles based on olive oil. (Olive oil? Yes, olive oil.) The effect of the latter was a chunk of chocolate that was full of crunchy little fig seeds and yet spreadable like cream cheese, which we proceeded to do on wedges of loud and assertive blue cheese that were passed around. That was the unique focus of this evening: a chocolate that goes well with cheese. Not all that far out there, actually, when you think about it—but when we're talking about such wild-n-crazy flavors as blue cheese and fig truffles, it had all kinds of ways things could have gone wrong. But oddly enough, it didn't, and—as long as you put on enough of the truffle to counterbalance the strong flavor of the cheese—the combination was really quite awesome.
Then we all lined up and rolled our own truffles using the same ganache as goes into the lavender bonbons they make; finished off with cocoa powder and dropped in a tin, they made a nice take-home item for each of us.
The class was, naturally, full—and apparently a lot of the attendees come to as many of these things as they can fit in. Yet the general feeling was that even among the locals who have lived in New York for the better parts of their lives and have never owned a car, discovering this tiny place near the end of Bleecker Street was a complete surprise. It was certainly a bombshell for everyone to hear about me and my recent removal here from California, and that I apparently knew more about the place—and, indeed, had more experience with truffle-making, especially the "what not to do" aspects of it—than many others there. I have an awful habit of trying to out-teach the teacher in things like this (my parents no doubt recall mortifying experiences involving me as a ten-year-old in front of any of a hundred tour groups asking the guide question after question), and I did my best to keep myself in check, but it was a challenge to say the least. (As is perhaps to be expected, a lot of the speaker's focus was on organic ingredients and fair-trade growing practices, and while I certainly can agree that it often makes things taste better, it's a shame to have to ignore whole swathes of the brand landscape just because your criteria are so limiting.) But by the end of the evening I'd made a few acquaintances from the area, faces I'll probably see again if I go back for another round.
Which I most certainly will. There's something about being no more than a couple of blocks from the subway at any given time that makes one willing to change a whole evening's schedule on a whim. Knowing that I don't have to worry about where my car is, and that I can get on a train pretty much any time and get pretty much anywhere, is a pretty liberating feeling.
I just might be taking advantage of it from time to time. Pizza classes? Goat cheese classes? Chocolate from bean to bar classes? Geez, at $50 for a two-hour chunk of time, it's a no-brainer...
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Brian Tiemann
