“Ask Matt Caputo” is an ongoing feature where Matt answers commonly asked questions from the market. This week, he gives us a glimpse into the creation of a cheese board from a restaurant perspective. 

Q:  Matt, I just got home with lots of new, delicious cheeses. How do I store them properly and what’s the best way to wrap them?

A: Unfortunately, there is not one right way to store cheese. Depending on the style of cheese the micro flora responsible for it’s aging react differently to storage techniques. For example, most American produced cheddar is made to be aged (anaerobically) from start to finish in vacuum sealed bags. When storing this type of cheese at home it would react much better to being tightly wrapped in plastic than say an English style cheddar that was made to be aged in an (aerobic) open air environment. Absent of tight plastic wrapping the American example may get moldy more quickly than the English style. The right way to store cheese depends on it’s type.

PSST! Want to know more? Join us at an Intro to Fine Cheese class! Looking for even more cheeses to take home (or have them shipped to you)? Start here. 

Disclaimer: While Matt Caputo is a Certified Cheese Professional and specialty food fanatic, he is not a medical professional, doctor, or certified nutritionist. Please consult with your doctor or other qualified health care professional before making any healthcare decisions, diagnostics or treatment decisions based on Matt’s answers.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, I could feel the pie-anxiety sneaking up on me one chilly fall morning. Baking pies has never been my forte. I had a few hours to kill and some seasonal ingredients in the fridge begging to be used. I figured it was time to come up with what I intended to contribute to Thanksgiving dinner. As the baker in my family, a pie seemed to be the best option. I cracked open my favorite baking book for ideas and was almost immediately swayed away from making a pie, thank God! A gorgeous galette called my name from the first page I flipped to.

A galette is essentially a pie without the dish. Although this free-standing “pie” of sorts is not meant to hold your creamy pumpkin or other custard pie filling from your grandma’s recipe book, it never hurts to switch things up. It may even help you win the unspoken Thanksgiving cook off between relatives. A galette is best suited to be filled with more texturally diverse ingredients such as pieces of sautéed apples, pears, squash, or root veggies and served as a delightful hors d’oeuvre or dessert. It saves a dirty dish, and looks just as, if not more, impressive for the Thanksgiving table.

The pastry dough I used for this recipe is a bit more delicate than your average pie crust; therefore, it requires a more attentive process. As a result, the finished product has much less of a risk of a soggy bottom and is much flakier and easier to handle than a piece of pie. Don’t hesitate to use a pastry dough recipe that has always worked for you. This, or any galette, is versatile enough to be made using any pastry dough of your choosing.

The filling is a simple combination of caramelized onions, roasted squash, herbs, a little spice, and my favorite goat milk cheese, Chabrin! I used Caputo’s cave aged Chabrin Reserve. This Chabrin is aged an additional 6 months in our cheese caves, making a more delicate, fudgy version of its original French-basque version. This cheese lends the perfect amount of funk to the filling to balance out the sweetness from the squash and onions, without feeling like you’re getting kicked in the teeth by a goat in each bite. A young Chabrin would also be a wonderful alternative to the reserve, as well as any other mild goats cheese (or any funky cheese that suits your fancy).

This is perfect to serve before your Thanksgiving meal, or even just as a seasonal snack to share with friends or loved ones.

Chabrin, Squash, and Onion Galette
Serves 6-8

Tartine bakery’s Flaky Tart Dough
*recipe is halved from original version, to fit single galette

• 1 cup unsalted butter, very cold
• ½ cup water
• ¾ tsp salt
• 2 1/3 cup All-Purpose Flour

To make the dough, cut the butter into 1-inch cubes and put them in the freezer. Measure the water, dissolve the salt into it, and put it in freezer as well. Chill the butter and water for about 10 minutes.

Measure all of the flour onto your work surface. Spread the flour out into a rectangle about 1/3 inch deep. Scatter the butter cubes over the flour. Toss a little of the flour over the butter so that your rolling pin won’t stick and then begin rolling. When the butter starts flattening out into long, thin pieces, use a bench scraper to scoop up the sides of the rectangle so that it is again the size you started with. Repeat the rolling and scraping 3 or 4 times. Make a well in the center and pour all of the water into the well. Using the bench scraper, scoop the sides of the dough onto the center, cutting (mixing in with the bench scraper) the water into the dough. Keep scraping and cutting until the dough is a shaggy mass, and then shape the dough into a rectangle about 10×14 inches. Lightly dust the top with flour. Roll out the rectangle until it is half again as large and then scrape the top, bottom, and sides together again to the original size and reroll. Repeat 3 or 4 times until you have a smooth cohesive dough. You should have a neat rectangle measuring about 10×14 inches. Transfer the dough to a large baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and chill well, about 1 hour.

Filling

• 2 cups butternut squash, cut in ½ inch cubes
• 1 Tbs unsalted butter
• 1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 large or 2 small sweet onions, cut into thin strips
• 1 tsp fresh sage
• 1 tsp fresh thyme
• 1/3 lb Chabrin Reserve cheese, grated
• salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste
• 1 egg
• 1 Tbs water

Preheat oven to 350. While dough is chilling, toss butternut squash in olive oil, salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes, and roast on a lined sheet pan for 30 minutes, or until squash can be easily pierced with a fork.
While squash is roasting, melt butter in a pan, and add onions. Cook on medium-low heat for 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Once onions are half-way caramelized, season with salt and herbs. Add a tablespoon of water if needed.
Remove squash from oven and carefully combine with onions. When cool enough, fold in Chabrin (or cheese of choice), and season to taste.

Assembly

When dough has chilled, fold dough over itself 2-3 times and re-roll until you have a circle measuring about 14 inches in width. Transfer back to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and chill until firm, about 10 minutes. When chilled, fill the center of the dough with prepared filling, leaving 3-4 inches of dough to fold over filling.
Beat egg and 1 Tablespoon water, and lightly brush over the dough. Bake on a lined sheet pan 50-60 minutes, or until galette looks golden. Top with flaky seat salt of choice.

I have a cold. Or a sinus infection. Or maybe it’s allergies. I have symptoms pointing to all three possibilities and I’m bamboozled by my body’s ability to feel so ambiguously yucky. The weather is warming up, the skies are mostly clear, and I’m in bed with a box of tissues and a queue or Real Housewives reruns.

While the weather works out its springtime kinks, I’ll be working out the kinks in my sinuses. After all the vitamins, supplements, tea, and vegetables, I find myself aching for something more comforting and warm (read: pasta). On this eve of our upcoming Cheese Caves Week, a bowl of hot pasta sounds like the perfect thing to soothe my soul while I spend hours on WedMD self diagnosing.

This sick gal wants carbonara but is missing ingredients and has no energy to get to a grocery store. Said sick gal has loads of cheese in the fridge (after all, who do you think I am?) and a head full of either stubborn American ingenuity or enough muck to cloud my classic culinary judgments. A lovely chunk of Grotte Tartufo sat atop my pile of cheeses, begging to be grated atop my ‘kinda sorta’ carbonara. Grotte Tartufo doesn’t melt the way alpine style cheeses do and will rather wilt atop hot pasta rather than coat it. I began imagining a pure white iteration of carbonara and didn’t look back from there. This is how Grotte Tartufo met a partial Pasta Carbonara and how the working title was born. Friends, meet Tartufonara. Partially carbonara, but mostly carbonara technique applied to loads of cheese and pasta.

Use this recipe as a blank canvas and add other cheeses, spring vegetables, or not much else for your own (insert ingredient here)-onara. I felt better after a bowl of this, and I hope you do too.

Pasta Tartufonara
Serves 6-8

• kosher salt
• 1 lb bronze dye cut pasta (This isn’t a classic recipe, so there are no rules! We loved it on calamarata, but a long noodle like spaghetti would make this feel more traditional)
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup Parmigiano Reggiano, finely grated
• 3 ounces Grotte Tartufo, roughly grated or chopped.

Bring a large part of water to a rolling boil and season with kosher salt. Add pasta and cook just past al dente. (The pasta will finish cooking as you toss with the sauce, but since this won’t happen over heat, we want the pasta to be just moments from being finished rather than minutes)

While pasta cooks, whisk eggs and Parmigiano in a large bowl until a pale yellow paste forms. When pasta in nearly ready to be pulled from the water, take a cup of pasta water from the pot and, while whisking the egg and Parm paste, slowly drizzle the pasta water into the paste. This will temper the egg so as not to become curds and help create a silky sauce. Remove pasta directly to the bowl with egg and cheese and toss to coat and finish cooking, adding more pasta water as needed. Just before serving, toss in Grotte Tartufo and any other ingredients you’d like to include (think blanched peas, chopped greens, or crispy prosciutto). Serve immediately.

We’ve been making our own burrata for a few years now. Lots of things have changed around here, but one question has the same response since the very first time we were asked:

Question: ‘What should I make with burrata?’
Answer: ‘Nothing.’
Insert puzzled looks here
Reattempted Answer: ‘We usually just eat it with a spoon.’

There’s something about burrata that begs for sweet simplicity. Really, all you need is a small bowl, a spoon, and Netflix. We do, however, sometimes get the itch to create a more grand presentation or burrata-based treat. There are, of course, many time-consuming, delicious, and decadent things to be made with this cheese, but our very favorite preparations require less than ten minutes’ work and fewer than five other ingredients. That creamy, delicate flavor deserves to shine. The best way to do that is to find two or three other components that will graciously support burrata as the darling of the plate, the shining star on your palate.

When I’m putting together such a plate, I look for ingredients that will add texture, aroma, and brightness in color and flavor. On the simplest of days, this can be achieved with a great baguette, a super green, fruity condiment olive oil (e.g. Viola oils), and a finishing salt (e.g. fleur de sel/fior di sale). But, for a plate to impress your pals, try something like this strawberry, burrata, and hazelnut situation.

The Breakdown: This is more of a suggestion than an actual recipe. Swap various fruits, nuts, and base layers. Maybe you’ll want this on a bed of greens, or built atop crostini. Take the reins, and build to your heart’s desire.

The centerpiece is–you guessed it–burrata. Freshly chopped strawberries will add nice acidity and lovely color. A sprinkling of lightly chopped tarragon adds aroma and depth to each bite. Barroero Toasted & Salted Hazelnuts are the texture and salty component needed to round out the finished plate. Need a little something more? Aged balsamic can amp up sweetness OR condiment olive oil can contribute to that unctuous, burrata texture and also introduce some well appreciated bitterness to counterbalance the sweetness from the strawberries. I wouldn’t add both oil and balsamic together, but you are the boss of your own plate. Go forth, my dear eaters! Enjoy the beauty of simplicity, revel in your ability not to complicate life and plate, and reap the benefits of freshly made burrata.

Enjoy, friends. Eat well and eat happily.

Something happened. It was special, beautiful, inspiring, and even a little bit heartbreaking. We gave it a silly sounding name, yet the experience was everything but.

That silly name and transcendent affair was Goat Camp. We gathered a handful of our Caputo’s team and some of our beloved restaurateur friends and headed south to the open spaces of Utah where the landscape is tinted red and passion for food culture is surprisingly easy to find. From Caineville to Boulder, our little group had the experience of a lifetime. Mesa Farm, Hell’s Backbone Farm and Restaurant, and Ruth Lewandowski Wines were our destinations and now our lingering inspirations.

Stop 1: Mesa Farm, owned by Randy Ramsley, home to the happiest goats and cutest kids in Utah

In a humble farm market store, over nibbles of Randy’s cheeses and fresh coffee, I, and many others, rediscovered why we do what we do. Matt has always said it best – we don’t work in specialty food because we want to be millionaires; we do it because we have a love for food, with its cultural and historical implications, and we have to protect that. Randy’s cheeses are as excellent as they are because Randy is committed to creating them from the very best beginnings. His herd – which is now at 38 lovely little goat ladies- graze freely on the banks of the Fremont river. During the winter, their diets are supplemented with a much higher quality feed than industry standard; in fact, it’s organically grown specifically for Randy’s herd by his neighbors. That doesn’t come cheap. Even more surprising than their feeding practices was learning that Randy only milks during the natural cycle. As winter comes and the babes begin grazing themselves, Randy does not give the goats any kind of hormone to lengthen the milking. When they dry up, he closes up shop until the next spring. This is so uncommon and nearly unheard of in modern day cheese production, even for most artisan cheese production.

Since Randy doesn’t cut corners (or costs): we receive the kind of quality cheeses people write poems and love stories about. Whether it’s one of our cave-aged cheeses, chevre, or feta, the taste is unlike any other cheeses we carry. There’s true Utah terroir buried deep within the paste of each cheese because that’s where it came from. From the natural grasses and plants nourished by the Fremont river to the buckets of milk separated into curds and whey, something truly magical happens. Add expert cave aging to the mix from the loving, deft hands of our own affineuse, Antonia Horne, and suddenly, it’s like nothing else matters and no cheese ever existed before this one.

With all this beautiful imagery and romanticism, I almost forgot Randy was facing closure of his farm before our partnership. It wasn’t until Caputo’s and our customers began purchasing and raving about the cheeses that things started looking up. This year, Mesa cheeses got a nice little makeover with beautiful logo art. It’s so gorgeous that it attracted more help and interns to his farm, which is helping create the means to continue operations and cheesemaking. Randy called Caputo’s, chefs, and customers the “forefront of this industry.” He used the term “conscious sustainability” to convey this sort of community oriented promotion of good food. It helped me recognize that we’re all in this together and that our support of one another is invaluable.

That was the moment when I experienced my most recent cheese epiphany.

I love Caputo’s, and I love what I do here. Much of that is sharing food and stories and history at our classes. I love seeing people’s faces when they try something for the first time and fall in love, their eyes might glaze over as the subconscious takes over and I can see euphoria take hold. But to be honest, what I love more is seeing people begin to understand how important food culture is to our existence and our experience. We talk about cheeses that are going extinct and why it’s happening. For example, the oldest cheese recipe known to man lives in our cases, but today, it’s going extinct. Our grandchildren won’t have the chance to try it. In our lifetime, after over THREE THOUSAND years of production, this cheese is headed for extinction. This is why it matters and this is why Randy’s work can’t go unnoticed. If one of the oldest cheeses in the world is in danger, what does that mean for cheese made in our own state? What does that mean for all food here in Utah? We’re on the brink of losing history, culture, and the side of food that makes people come together with the people they love to share a meal. This isn’t about food as fuel, this is about food as love and the war being waged against that in the name of economic efficiency, cutting quality for the prize of lower costs. Hence the heartbreak.

Heartbreak aside, hope exists. Hope exists at Mesa Farm and hope exists at Caputo’s. Tony picked up a torch for the cause when he opened the doors of Caputo’s twenty years ago. Randy and Matt did the same with a new resurgence of passion and dedication to protect who we are because of what we create and consume.  Every restaurant that makes the decision to feature a Mesa cheese on their menu is a win for Utah food and another hand in the fight. Hope exists when each of us commits to supporting Mesa Farm by sharing it with our friends at dinner parties and at picnics. Even when it feels small, it always matters.

So in that farm market, surrounded by co-workers and friends, I rediscovered my passion and I watched everyone else rediscover theirs. Matt and Randy engaged in the kind of conversation that make you want to dry your tears and save the world. It was just like watching the cheese epiphanies in a class at Caputo’s, except I was having the epiphany and was incapable of hiding my newfound excitement. Everyone else seemed to have a similar experience. Dry eyes were scarce that morning, and I know not a single one of us was ashamed to show it. Passion runs deep with a group of people like us, and I am so, so proud to be a part of it.

***In 2023, Randy of Mesa Farm entered his beautifully earned retirement. The farm and its singular cheeses will live on in our hearts and stories for years to come.***

Part 1 of 4. Go to Part 2: Hell’s Backbone.