Weeks of waiting for one baby tomato and what a 13-year mole sauce taught me about cheese

I've picked up a new hobby this year. I'm growing my own vegetables, and I've found a real passion for it, which makes sense because I love to create.

What I didn't expect was how long everything takes. We've been watching our tomatoes for weeks and weeks, waiting for one little baby tomato to finally be ready to eat. Same with the jalapeños.

It got me thinking about a 13-year mole sauce I tried a couple of years ago. I remember being blown away by the layers and complexity of what that much time had built.

Which of course brings me back to our cheese. If you want a good one, you have to take the time and be patient with the process. None of our cheeses take less than two days to make, and every one is still made by hand with fresh ingredients and traditional cheesemaking techniques.

A lot of that is stuff you'd never guess from the outside. We roast fresh garlic for the Tomato Fromage. We use fresh red peppers in the Smoked Cheddar, and for the Hatch Chile Cheddar, we roast the chiles and hand-cut them before they go in.

We love using fermented foods, so the Smoked Cheddar also gets umeboshi plum vinegar. It adds amazing flavor and it's good for you. It's a little hack we do, and most people would never spot it on the label.

Then there's the part where we do nothing at all. We add cultures and enzymes and wait. Over days and weeks, they each create their own distinctive natural flavors. Same as the tomatoes, you can't rush it.

That's how we get flavor without adding flavoring or weird ingredients you can't pronounce. Time and the right cultures do it for us.

Every so often, a message comes in from someone worried about their blue cheese. They open the package, see the veins, and write to ask if it's gone off. It hasn't. That's the part that took us the longest to get right. 

It's a fresh blue, and the veins come from butterfly pea flower powder and spirulina, which are good for you and add flavor along with the color.

That fresh blue only exists in one place, our Buffalo Blue Dip, and this is the last call. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time.

Thanks for being on this journey with us.

Kirsten
Co-founder, Rebel Cheese

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