Featured Stories
Fourth Annual SF Cheese Fest Brings Local Cheesemakers and Enthusiasts Together for Two Days of Cheese Bliss
California Artisan Cheese Guild (CACG), the state’s only nonprofit dedicated to sustaining California’s artisan cheesemaking community, announces the Fourth Annual SF Cheese Fest taking place September 15 and 16. Due to the ever-growing excitement around local cheese, SF Cheese Fest is expanding to two days of cheese education and enjoyment, featuring Saturday night’s popular walk-around tasting event, the Cheesemaker Celebration, at the historic Social Hall SF, and introducing a brand new series of Sunday Seminars with The Cheese School of San Francisco.
This year’s theme is “4 x 4” in honor of the SF Cheese Fest’s fourth anniversary and the fact that this year’s events will be celebrating cheeses made with all four types of milk (cow, goat, sheep, and water buffalo). At Saturday night’s Cheesemaker Celebration, guests will meet and mingle with over 20 Guild-member cheesemakers from across the state, sampling dozens of new and classic California cheeses. The cheeses will be paired with artisan pickles, preserves and charcuterie as well as plenty of local beer, cider and wine to ensure lively pairing discoveries. While sipping and sampling, guests will also enjoy live music and all attendees will receive a free 1-year subscription to Culture magazine.
SF Cheese Fest has become a beloved yearly tradition for local foodies and cheese lovers, and this year’s expansion to two days demonstrates the public’s desire for more cheese education. “The SF Cheese Fest’s theme of ‘4 x 4’ promises a fun and delicious weekend of tasting and learning about the differences that types of milk can have on a cheese’s style,” says CACG Executive Director, Anthea Stolz. “We are very excited to partner with The Cheese School of San Francisco this year to expand our offerings to include hands-on educational seminars on Sunday.”
The roster of participating cheese companies ranges from pioneering cheesemakers Bellwether Farms, Cowgirl Creamery, Cypress Grove, Laura Chenel’s, Marin French Cheese and Point Reyes Farmstead to local favorites Achadinha Cheese, Bleating Heart, Moonside Creamery, Nicasio Valley Cheese and Tomales Farmstead Creamery. From the around the state, Central Coast Creamery, Pedrozo Dairy & Cheese, Stuyt Dairy Farmstead Cheese and William Cofield Cheesemakers will join the festivities, alongside Utah cousin-in-cheese Beehive Cheese, and newcomers to the SF Cheese Fest scene, Folly Cheese Co. and Nicolau Farms.
Ticket proceeds benefit the California Artisan Cheese Guild, a statewide nonprofit dedicated to the education and support of artisan cheese making. Tickets for both days will go on sale Tuesday, July 17 and are expected to sell out. Tickets to Saturday’s Cheesemaker Celebration include entry and access to all bites, beverages and live music. Limited “Bring a Friend” tickets will also be available for those who would like to purchase two tickets at a discounted price. More details about the Sunday Seminars including times and themes will be announced soon. Tickets to the Sunday Seminars will not include entry to Saturday night’s Cheesemaker Celebration.
Saturday night’s Cheesemaker Celebration takes place from 6-9pm on Saturday, September 15 at Social Hall SF, located at 1270 Sutter Street in San Francisco. Tickets for the Saturday Celebration are $84 each and include all food and beverage sampling and live music. Limited “Bring a Friend” tickets will be $149 for two. Tickets will go on sale Tuesday, July 17 through the SF Cheese Fest website www.sfcheesefest.com/tickets.
The Sunday Seminars will take place on September 16 at The Cheese School of San Francisco’s new Ghirardelli Square campus. More details about the classes will be announced shortly, and tickets will go on sale Tuesday, July 17 via Eventbrite.
SF Cheese Fest is made possible by continued sponsorship, including Silver Sponsors Bellwether Farms and World’s Best Cheeses; and Bronze Sponsors Cypress Grove Cheese, Beehive Cheese Co., and Tony’s Fine Foods.
SF Cheese Fest is the primary fundraiser for the California Artisan Cheese Guild, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artisan cheesemakers throughout the State.
Slow Food Nations is Coming Up
Slow Food Nations will be held in Denver, Colorado, from July 13-15, 2018. The full schedule, including a leaders summit, is now available at www.slowfoodnations.org. The event is free and open to the public, with select ticketed events.
Terra Madre Salone del Gusto will be held Sept 20-24, 2018 in Turin, Italy. This world meeting of food communities is one of the world’s most important events dedicated to artisan and small-scale food producers, as well as an international forum of exchange.
Willy Wonka Rides Again
By Lorrie Baumann
If you’ve ever wondered who’d be cast to play you if Hollywood ever decided to make a movie about your life, you certainly aren’t alone. Brent Davis doesn’t have to wonder: Hollywood already made “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” and in the version of that movie that Davis prefers, Gene Wilder played the wildly whimsical and endlessly inventive master of the chocolate factory.
Davis is the President of Davis Chocolate, a company primarily devoted to making private-label chocolate products for other companies. If you need a gluten-free, Paleo-certified chocolate chip for your specialty trail mix snack or you need a single-origin bar sweetened with coconut sugar and named after your company, he’s the man who can do that for you. “They tell us what they want, and we help them get what they need,” Davis says of his customers. “We specialize in making custom recipes.”
The products made in his factory include truffles, chips, chunks and bars – chips and chunks often for the baking industry and many of the truffles for customers who demand organic certification. “There’s not many organic truffle makers out there,” Davis observes.
Another of his specialties is products that include peanut butter – an ingredient for which he has such a particular fondness that he’s even created an inside-out peanut butter cup bar, with chocolate in the middle and the peanut butter on the outside. “We create lots of different products that are out there that are unique. I like to create different things,” he says. “Peanut butter is a weakness of mine, and it goes very well with chocolate.”
Wine also goes very well with chocolate, and Davis Chocolate is now also making Wave Chocolate Sticks for Wine Pairing. These are artisan chocolate cocktail sticks for pairing with wine and cocktails. They’re certified organic, kosher, and vegan. They’re made from single-origin chocolate from Ecuador, which Davis feels is a chocolate that pair exceptionally well with wine, and include only three ingredients: organic cacao, organic sugar and organic cocoa butter. “What we did was match up the sugar levels so that they match a wider variety of wines,” Davis says. One of the reasons he picked chocolate to eat while drinking wine, he says, is “because it’s fun to drink wine.”
Davis has been thinking about chocolate since he was about six years old, although in those days, he’d often take a pass on a chocolate bar in favor of a plate of macaroni and cheese. The problem with the chocolate bar was that if he bought the bar while he was out and about on his bicycle on a hot summer day, he knew that he’d have to eat all of it right away before it melted. He didn’t want to buy a chocolate bar and eat it all at once – he wanted to be able to save some of it for later. Today, when he has to pinpoint the moment that he started thinking about how to make a different kind of chocolate, that’s the memory that comes to mind, and it explains why he has even invented a liquid chocolate bar. “If I had a liquid candy bar, I would have bought this as a kid because then I could eat it anytime I wanted,” he says.
He’s still doing that kind of thinking, now often starting with the thoughts that his customers bring to him. They might ask for chocolate sweetened with coconut sugar because they’re looking for a low glycemic index – that’s a request that Davis is getting fairly frequently these days. “Most of our private label customers come to us with new ideas. We may not know, but, ‘Let’s see what we can do for you,’ … We need to be very diverse,” he says. “One of our specialties is using peanut butter or chocolate chips with coconut sugar…. Or Paleo – there’s a lot of different requests we have. Plus, it’s fun to create things and to stay busy too, of course.”
