"SEATTLE: UNDISPUTED Cheese Capital of the World."
Kurt Dammeier had his tongue firmly in cheek, of course, when he made a YouTube video with that claim after helping persuade the august American Cheese Society to hold its national conference here.
But the big cheeses of the trade, so to speak, will have plenty to chew on Aug. 25-28 when they see what Washington does with curds and whey. Attendees will hear a talk by Michael Pollan. They'll hear seminars. But they'll also get a taste of the maturing Washington cheese industry, which now has 42 licensed cheesemakers, up from 28 in 2007 and nine in 2000.
"Not that much of what we do here has leaked out to the national level," said Dammeier, founder of Beecher's Handmade Cheese, one of the few locals to win national attention.
A handful of Washington cheesemakers are well-known to cheese writers and to aficionados. But "then there are places like Port Madison (a goat farm on Bainbridge Island) that nobody knows about, making great cheese," Dammeier said. He has long argued that Washington cheeses are as promising, and underappreciated, as our wines were 20 years back.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Seattle Times.