Posts Tagged ‘Healthy Living Natural Food Market’

• 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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• 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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• Farming for the Future Conference

  Date: 01.21.2010 | Category: Coming Up | Response: 0

  It’s not too late to register for the PASA (Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture) 19th Annual “Farming for the Future” Conference to be held February 4 to 6 at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel in State College, Pennsylvania. One of the most respected and possibly the largest gathering of sustainable food enthusiasts in the country, this year’s conference examines hot topics in the great sustainable challenge with workshops on Innovations in Organic No-Till, Conservation Payments for Organic Farming, Energy Realities in a Sustaining Food System, The Benefits of Networking, The Lost Art of Unpowered Cold Farming and much, much more.

  Keynote speakers include Michael Reynolds, a world leader in sustainable housing, and Lisa M. Hamilton, the author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness (Counterpoint, 2009).

  More Regional Events

  (All events take place in Vermont unless otherwise noted.)

  Thursday, January 21

  Intro to Permaculture: Learn how to boost health and productivity in your own backyard at this workshop given by Burlington Permaculture’s Mark Krawszyk. 6:30 to 8:30 pm, Burlington Public Works Department. $10 donation. Call 802.999.2768 for more info.

  Indoor Gardening Workshop: Learn the steps to harvesting pea shoots in your home kitchen in just seven days. 6 to 7 pm, Hunger Mountain Co-op, Montpelier. Call 802.223.8004 x202 to reserve a place.

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• Vermont’s Own (and Only) Cranberries

  Date: 11.20.2009 | Category: Farmer Beat | Response: 1

  “A sound berry bounces,” explains Bob Lesnikoski, Vermont’s only commercial cranberry farmer. “A rotten berry won’t.”

  When you buy a box of fat, round garnet-colored cranberries from Vermont Cranberry Company you can bet they’ll all be bouncers.

  Lesnikoski excavated and planted his first cranberry bog 13 years ago on a small farm in northwest Vermont. He began selling fresh cranberries two years later. “It’s not the easiest crop to grow here,” he says, “but it does work. We produce a premium berry. Our size sorting and color sorting is quite a bit more rigorous than just about any other fresh berry out there.”

  Each October Lesnikoski can expect to harvest and bounce-test about 30,000 pounds of berries from his three-acre farm in East Fairfield. Of that yield, about 60 percent is sold fresh to area markets and restaurants. The rest become dried cranberries, frozen cranberries, cranberry juice, cranberry wine or specialty cranberry preserves. Some of these products will bear the Vermont Cranberry Company label. Some berries turn up in other fine local products including Champlain Orchard’s Cranberry Apple Cider and in Boyden Valley Winery’s Cranberry Wine (which, BTW, makes the most refreshing pre-dinner spritzer imaginable).

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