This a monthly series which I have been publishing for years. You can subscribe here, to get the latest cheese delivered directly on to your screen.
Funnily enough being blue means something totally different German than in English, and that is being drunk (although that could of course induce the blues the day after…). Neither applies to the happy, cheerful woman Ute Rohrbeck is, or her cheeses, which certainly aren’t drunk.
Her Blauer Künstler, blue artist, is a very serious and yet friendly masterpiece. The small round soft goats‘ milk cheese is intervened with blue mould and coated with it, and the result tastes not a bit too strong or salty, but gentle and quiet and complex and it smells of fresh button mushrooms, intensifying to a whole pan full of wild mushrooms with some age. Ute Rohrbeck is entirely self-taught as a cheese maker and during the last 13 years has built up a well functioning small dairy in the beautiful Schaalsee region one hour’s drive from Hamburg. She is using the organic milk from the 140 goats her business partner Roger Meyer zur Capellen keeps nearby to make a multitude of different cheeses. Which she now also sells at her own shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg, also called Kunst & Käse, art and cheese! And that makes total sense because the art on the walls is definitely worth a visit, just as much as the blue artist.
PS As you can probably tell this gorgeous picture was taken by a pro, food photographer Manuel Krug, with whom I (very joyously and successfully) collaborated on the Chinese cookbook, and recently did a day of cheese shooting for the American magazine Culture, the Word on Cheese – watch this space!
Postscript: In 2017 Ute Rohrbeck decided to devote her creative energies to other areas of life and stopped making cheese.
This a monthly series which I have been publishing for years. You can subscribe here, to get the latest cheese delivered directly on to your screen.
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