Archive for the ‘Producer Beat’ Category

• Say “Cremont”!

  Date: 05.14.2010 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  Have you heard? There’s a new cheese on the block. If you haven’t yet met Cremont, you’re going to want to get to know this American original. But you’ll have to wait a few days–the cheese is sold out until next week.

  Cremont is the latest release from Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery in Websterville. A mix of fresh cow’s and goat’s milk with a hint of fresh cream, the newcomer has been described by one fan as tasting as if Vermont Creamery’s Bonne Bouche and ricotta had had a baby. This is a perfect cheese for cheese novices—the goat flavor is elegant, not aggressive, and the texture is creamy and light, almost like a mousse.

  Don Hooper, husband of VT Creamery cheesemaker and co-founder Allison Hooper, came up with the name, which says both “cream” and “Vermont” at first bite. The Creamery’s general manager Adeline Druart explained that the cheese had been in development for more than a year. “It took us eight months of playing with the ratios to arrive at the right blend of cow’s milk, goat’s milk and crème fraîche.” The cheese’s butter-colored, wrinkly rind comes from geotricum yeast and two weeks in the Creamery’s aging room.

  With a butterfat content of 66 percent, Cremont is considered a double-cream cheese. It’s an ideal dessert cheese. Druart suggests serving it with biscotti or a fresh strawberry compote. She recently paired Cremont with a Vidal Blanc Ice Wine from Shelburne Vineyard with great success.

  Cremont (as well as other fine Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery cheeses and butter) is available at their online store. You can also find the new cheese at these establishments in Vermont and New Hampshire.

  Butters Fine Food and Wine (Concord, New Hampshire)

  Lebanon Co-op (Lebanon, New Hampshire)

  Hunger Mountain Co-op (Montpelier, Vermont)

  Healthy Living Natural Foods Market (South Burlington, Vermont)

  J.K. Adams  Co. (Dorset, Vermont)

  Sweet Clover Market (Essex, Vermont)

  Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery • 40 Pitman Road, Websterville, VT 05678 • 800.884.6287 • info@vermontcreamery.com

  See more great images of Vermont Creamery on our flickr page!
  

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• Caledonia’s Collaborative Spirit

  Date: 05.07.2010 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  Ever since the federal distilling license was granted last month, Vermont’s newest micro-distillery has been going at full boil. Hardwick (aka The Town that Food Saved) is the new home of Caledonia Spirits/Honey Gardens Winery.

  We caught up with owner Todd Hardie yesterday as a truckful of organic blueberries was just arriving from Burke Hill Farms in Cherryfield, Maine. After weeks and months of careful tending by mead master/head alchemist Dana Matthews, the blueberries will be transformed into Honey Gardens Blueberry Mead, a soft, aromatic wine that pairs beautifully with chicken.

  Matthews also wears the distiller’s hat at Caledonia Spirits. She’s been working with the shiny new Revenoor 25-gallon copper still to produce a neutral grain spirit, which will serve as a base for Caledonia Spirits’ products. She and Hardie are developing a Vermont interpretation of Chartreuse, the fabled elixir made for centuries by French Carthusian monks, which will be flavored with local herbs and aromatics.

  There’s an elderberry cordial and a gin in the works too. Named after the highest point in nearby Greensboro, Barr Hill Gin will be flavored with local juniper berries. Matthews was mum on the identity of the other botanicals. “That’s a secret,” she remarked. Hardie and Matthews expect to have all three spirits ready to release to the public by the end of the year.

  The new operation is on the Lamoille River, within walking distance of downtown Hardwick. “It’s great to be here,” said Hardie. “There’s a real spirit of collaboration. The sum of us here in Hardwick is greater than we are individually. I’ll email fellow food producers in the morning looking for advice or to source some supplies and I’ll have five or six answers by noon.”

  What’s in the future for Caledonia Spirits? Hardie is already thinking about a grappa. “There are a lot of vineyards in the state and that means a lot of grape skins.” Or perhaps a whisky. It seems only natural since they are in Caledonia County.

  Caledonia Spirits · PO Box 1249, Hardwick, VT · 802.472.8000· todd@caledoniaspirits.com
  
  See more great images of Caledonia Spirits on our flickr page!

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• A Very Vermont Valentine

  Date: 02.05.2010 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  What do Vermont localvores give their chocolate-loving sweethearts for Valentine’s Day since the nearest cacao plantation is on the island of Jamaica, not in the southern Vermont town of Jamaica?

  

  Truffles. Chocolate truffles. From Lake Champlain Chocolates, of course.

  Most people don’t think of chocolate as a local product, but Burlington’s Lake Champlain Chocolates is working hard to change that. The company uses as many local products as possible, from butter and cream to honey to maple syrup. Because it’s not just chocolate that makes their chocolate truffles so rich, so creamy, so irresistible. The secret is in the prize-winning butter, Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery’s cultured butter to be exact.

  “We carefully select all of the ingredients that go into our chocolates and the butter we use is no exception,” says David Bolton, director of LCC’s product development.” Vermont Butter & Cheese makes a European-style cultured butter, churned from crème fraîche that gives our truffles a fuller, richer flavor.” The butter recently placed first in the country for Best Cultured Butter by the American Cheese Society. The butter is churned from cream from the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery near the Canadian border.

  With a commitment to sustainable agriculture and to creating products of the highest quality, the Lake Champlain Chocolates and Vermont Butter & Cheese Creamery partnership is a natural fit. The two companies both began in the early 1980s, back when premium chocolates and cheeses came from Europe, not from a couple of northern Vermont start-ups. Both companies persevered, and now 25 years later, they are doing business together and thriving.

  Lake Champlain Chocolates are sold at the factory store on Pine Street in Burlington, as well as at City Market, Cheese Outlet Fresh Market, Healthy Living, Dakin Farm and many other local retailers. Nationwide, Lake Champlain Chocolates are sold at Whole Foods Markets, Dean & Deluca, Balducci’s and other fine foods stores.

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• Honey Gardens’ Raw, Sweet Sustainability

  Date: 01.08.2010 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  Apiarist and botanical treasure-hunter Todd Hardie is passionate about bees and the plants that sustain them. He’s also the man to consult on apitherapy, the medical use of honeybee products. Hardie started Honey Gardens Apiaries in Ferrisburgh more than 30 years ago and was among the first to introduce raw, farm-style honey to Vermont and Boston markets.

  “Our honey is raw — never heated and not filtered — which allows it to be a medicine and a sweetener,” explains Hardie. “Raw honey contains more than 75 different compounds, including an exceptionally high enzyme content, minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates and organic acids. Our honey also has little flecks of pollen, which help build immunity to get over allergies.”

  Hardie’s primary focus has always been on bees, but bees need flowering plants to make honey and that’s how elderberries entered the Honey Gardens picture. In the ’90s, Greensboro orchardist Lewis Hill encouraged Hardie to make a cordial combining the curative qualities of honey and inky-black, antioxidant-rich elderberries. Today, many seek out Honey Gardens’ elderberry syrup, made from raw honey, organic elderberries and apple cider vinegar, to cure colds, lower cholesterol, and to boost heart health and the immune system. Others simply love its sweet-tart flavor in a refreshing spritzer.

  Hardie’s newest product is one whose history is at least a couple thousand years old. Honey wine or mead is made from water, yeast and honey. Hardie’s sparkling mead is similar to a Belgian-style craft beer and the ‘Melody’ dessert mead can be described as liquid ambrosia. Honey Gardens’ mead-making facility shares space with Shelburne Vineyards, a few miles north of HG’s Ferrisburgh headquarters.

  Honey Gardens products are available in natural foods stores and cooperatives throughout the USA.

  Honey Gardens of Vermont · 2777 VT Rte 7, Ferrisburgh, VT 05456
  802.877.6766 · info@honeygardens.com

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• The Connoisseur’s Cup of Coffee

  Date: 12.11.2009 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  How did little Waterbury, Vermont, population 4,915, become a world-class repository of coffee knowledge and home to some of the finest fresh-roasted coffee beans in the world when the nearest coffee plantation is 2,800 miles away?

  Mané Alves, that’s how.

  Nearly two decades ago, the Lisbon native and viticulturalist relocated to Vermont where he switched from tasting wines to tasting coffees. In 1995, Alves established Coffee Lab International, an independent coffee and beverage laboratory and training facility that supports the coffee industry through product development, quality control and sensory analysis. Two years later he opened Vermont Artisan Coffee & Tea Co., a coffee roasting, distribution and sales company.

  The company’s head roaster, Anji Heath, is a true connoisseur. She’ a graduate of Coffee Lab’s internship program and takes roasting to an art form, working to the standards of the old roast masters, extracting all the complex full flavor of the bean itself. All beans at Vermont Artisan are roasted to order to ensure freshness. There’s no warehousing of roasted beans—once they’re roasted, they’re shipped out the door. “Fresh roasting is key to good flavor, and it’s the core of Artisan’s business ideal,” Alves says.

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• Red Hen Digs Deep to Go Local

  Date: 11.06.2009 | Category: Producer Beat | Response: 0

  Red Hen Baking Company, now located at the historic Camp Meade in Middlesex, VT, has been making celebrated organic, hearth-baked artisan loaves for the past decade.

  “We’ve been organic from Day One,” says Red Hen Baking owner Randy George. “And local ingredients have always factored into our products. Their use has increased as availability has.”

  But when it comes to producing a good, chewy loaf, it’s a nearly insurmountable challenge for New England bakers to go local. The best wheat for bread–hard red winter wheat–grows on the Great Plains and is then trucked to flour mills along the Mississippi, ten times the distance prescribed by most localvores.

  But Randy George doesn’t let geography get in the way of producing a truly local Red Hen loaf. He’d heard that the Champlain Valley had been a top wheat producer in the 1850s. Not coincidentally, the premier wheat breeder at the time was one Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, a Charlotte, VT, resident.

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