Hard
Hard cheeses are seriously crumbly creations—far more dense, grainy and crunchy than cheeses that fall into the firm category. When crafting hard cheeses, the cheesemaker will press the cheese curds to remove as much of the excess whey (milky liquid) as possible. Oftentimes, the curds will then be gently cooked to dry out even more of the whey, ensuring that the cheese can then age for months and months with little concern of spoilage.
And along with their resiliency, hard cheeses also have some highly coveted flavor characteristics that younger cheeses just wouldn’t understand. For lack of a better term, aged cheeses typically have little flavor crystals (or salty bits) scattered throughout their interior. These welcome crunches are a result of amino acids and proteins in the cheese that have broken down over time, and have naturally crystallized and formed together. When the salt in these flavor crystals meet the nutty, sweet, caramel-like flavors of many hard cheeses, magic happens.
The classic examples of hard cheeses have historically come from Italy (parmigiano reggiano, pecorino) and Holland (aged goudas). And it was those mainstays that led to the creation of a classic American hard cheese: Vella Dry Jack from Vella Cheese.
A little background: In the early 1900s, a cheesemaker named David Jack in Monterey, Calif., started making a fresh cheese that would soon be called monterey jack. It sold pretty well, but the area’s Italian immigrants were hungry for the complex, crumbly, aged cheeses they’d left behind in Europe. To meet those demands, a local shop owner decided to rub salt and olive oil on the outside of a few wheels of monterey jack and stash them in his storeroom for a few months. The result, later called dry jack, was hard enough to be grated and mimicked many of the nutty flavors of a parmigiano reggiano.
Vella Cheese (founded by Tom Vella, run today by his son Ignazio) began making a dry jack in the 1930s and is still rocking the same recipe today—making Vella one of the only remaining domestic producers of all-natural dry jack.
Vella’s version of this California staple comes to cheese shops around the country in the form of a hand-molded wheel with a dark brown rind. That rind occurs because the Vella cheesemakers rub each wheel with a mixture of milk-chocolate powder, black pepper, and olive oil while the wheels age for a minimum of seven months. When finally cracked open, cheese fans are treated to sweet, nutty flavors of caramel with that much-desired crunch.
Try it with: The salty and sweet flavors found in Vella Dry Jack are perfectly suited for fruit-forward California Cabernets (the 2006 Joel Gott Cabernet Sauvignon “815” is a sure bet). Or skip the grape and try the grain—dark, roasted, malty beers like Bell’s Best Brown complement and play off the cheese’s strengths.
