On Saturday, March 10th, I attended the Cracking of the Cheese at Whole Foods Market. Since I was a bit short on time, I went to the smaller Woodmere location on Chagrin Blvd. The entire parking lot was full and I was a bit leery of the crowd that I might find in the store.
Lucky for me, I arrived in time to get a seat right in front of Jason and his 90 block of cheese. As it turned out, there were only about 15 people there for the event. I sat next to Sarah from Cooker Girl. It was nice to run into her.
Jason talked about the history and making of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.
- gets its name from the city of Parma and Reggio
- dates back to 12th century
- cows fed only food from the region
- consortium oversees all of the parts of the operation
- milk fat is used in butter and mascarpone
- 90% of the production is consumed in Italy
He also talked about the tools used to crack open a wheel.
As part of the Whole Foods event, every store was cracking a wheel at 3PM Eastern.
90 pounds of deliciousness will run about $1500 retail.
Samples were free.
I was glad that I attended the event and hope to see more of the store demos and events in the future. Thanks to Jason for sharing his talent and love of cheese with us.
Jason is awesome. People in Wisconsin have nothing on him.