Avalanche Cheese Company’s Goat Cheddar is a nominee for the 2015 Good Food Awards. (Photo by Colleen O’Connor, The Denver Post.)
Two cheeses from the local have been nominated for the 2015 Good Food Awards, which honor socially conscious food entrepreneurs across the country. At St. Kilian’s Cheese Shop and Market in the Highlands, one of the nominees – the Goat Cheddar — is prominently displayed. Itap a hard cheese, which makes it somewhat unique in Colorado.
“When you look at cheeses made in Colorado, you find more soft cheeses,” said co-owner Jon Marsh. “A lot of people tend to make fresh cheeses, because it can be difficult to age cheese here because of the low humidity. She does some of the best aged cheeses.”
He’s referring to Wendy Mitchell, owner of the Avalanche Cheese Company, who learned to make cheese when she spent a year living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and traveled the United Kingdom taking cheese-making classes and interning on farms and dairies.
The Goat Cheddar, aged six to 12 months, is made in the style of the traditional British cheddars. The Midnight Blue, also nominated for a Good Food Award, is a blue cheese with dark blue-gray veins, aged from two to four months. The company’s cheeses are made in Basalt with milk from goats raised and grazed on their farm and dairy in Paonia.
Here’s the list of the other Colorado nominees.
Charcuterie: The Avalanche Cheese Company is also nominated for its goat chorizo and goat finocchiona, a style of salami. The other Colorado company in this category is , for its smoked pheasant sausage.
Pickles: , for two of its items that are not yet on the market, cheriboshi, salted Paonia cherries, and umeboshi, salted Paonia plums.
Coffee: Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Konga from .
Beer: , for its Peachy Peach.
Spirits: for its CapRock Organic Pear Brandy.
The Good Food Award winners will be announced Jan. 8, 2015 at a gala event in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts. Each of the 150 winners will receive the award directly from Alice Waters, who helped launch the awards five years ago.
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