(continued... read the beginning here)
1) Feta is One Of The Best Cheeses In The World
Few people in the US realize just how great great feta can be — I really do think it's one of the world's top ten or twenty cheeses. That said, the reality is that feta is all too often politely, but firmly, pushed off to the side as sort of a low class pretender to the upper classes of the cheese world. It's just this quiet, unspoken bias, a prejudice, some sort of "cheese profiling" that keeps feta out of the realm that classics like Roquefort, English farmhouse cheddar, Parmigiano Reggiano, Stilton. It's not French, it's not fancy, there's no famous wine pairing for it, it comes in brine instead of surrounded by the romance of a carefully washed natural rind and you really don't ever see it sold with the elegant labels like the ones that adorn old-style Camembert.

Worse still, the feta field has been cluttered up by substandard copies that come from most every cheese making country you can imagine. Far more shops have sold feta from France, Denmark, Bulgaria, or North America than they have the Greek original. This piece of the campaign has gotten a bit of a boost in the last few years. After being copied — usually not very well — all over the world for decades, the name "Feta" is now protected. According to EU law, it must come mostly from sheep's milk and only from Greece. This is no small thing in Greece. As Diane Kochilas wrote last year in the New York Times, "If there were a culinary equivalent of the Elgin Marbles for the Greeks, that would surely be their white, tangy national cheese, feta. But unlike the famous carvings from the Parthenon, which Lord Elgin carted off two centuries ago, the country's national cheese was recently returned to Greece by the European Union."

The bottom line? If the campaign carries the day, people will start to put feta up there on their lists with all the other greats. It's already, as you can tell, on mine. For what it's worth too, I can tell you that feta — from the same artisan source we buy from here — is one of only four non-British or Irish cheeses that they sell at Neal's Yard Dairy in London. So when you next think about great cheeses of the world, at least give good feta a chance to get to the top.

2) There Are Radical Differences From One Feta To Another
If one stops to think about this, it's probably pretty obvious — what traditional food item (or any product for that matter) can you think of that doesn't appear in the marketplace with a wide variety of quality options? Everyone knows that raw milk farmhouse cheddar is likely to be radically better than some factory version. But the problem is that, when it comes to feta, there's generally been very little discussion of one brand being different or better tasting than another. Recipes just call for "feta" as if it were some generic, insurance-subsidized drug. My point here is that, in real life, there is a huge, huge range of feta qualities you can pick from. And what one picks is going to have a radical impact on your eating experience — the best fetas, quite simply, taste way, way better! That's all there is to it! Not surprisingly I stand by the barrel-aged feta we sell here, which is, of course, why we sell it.

Of course, the vast majority of the feta being sold today isn't all that good. Happily, there is still some fantastic feta out there to be had if you know where to look. At Zingerman's, we've been looking for many years now to the work of Vassilis Roussas, a cheesemaker in the region of Almyros in northern Greece. He's translated his passion and commitment to preserving traditional techniques into some really incredibly good feta. Vassilis' cheese meets all of the criterion for what great feta should be:

It's mostly sheep's milk — while you can produce a feta-style cheese out of cow's milk — every mass-market cheese distributor in this country sells one — making feta from cow's milk is like making fried chicken from pork. While fried pork might be very good in its own right, they're just two different things. The best fetas are made mostly or completely from sheep's milk, along with the addition of a moderately small proportion of goat.

The percentages will vary a bit through the course of the year, but right now the feta we're looking at is about 80 percent sheep's milk, 20 percent goat. Sheep's milk is the most costly of the three major cheesemaking milks, and the primary contributor to feta's character and flavor. It's by far the richest of the three; used for feta, it translates into a much softer cheese with a great creaminess that basically melts on your tongue as you eat it. You can spot it visually by looking for its pale white color. By contrast, cow's milk (which has much more beta carotene) will yield a yellower feta, which can only actually be white if it's been bleached. Feta made from cow's milk has a totally different (almost hard) texture and a very different flavor that's usually overly tart, and it can be quite salty.

The sheep graze in open — while the food world is talking a lot of late about grass-fed beef these days, there's a lot too to be said for cheese made from the milk of pasture fed animals. The sheep that contribute milk to Vassilis' feta graze in the open pastures in the mountains near Almyros. Open air grazing consistently seems to yield (there are exceptions) more flavorful milk and more complexly flavored cheeses. The same approach contributes to the wonderful flavor of so many of our cheeses, like the mountain Gruyere aged for us by Rolf Beeler in Switzerland; the wonderful Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese from Wisconsin; our organic farmhouse Parmigiano-Reggiano from the hills outside of Modena, and many others.

It's Barrel-Aged and It Tastes Better — What do bourbon, balsamic and feta have in common? The best of them are all barrel-aged. Different woods, different flavors, same idea. Barrel-aging allows for natural maturing of what's inside. Air moves, if slowly, flavors concentrate and mellow over time. While a pound of aged bourbon goes for about $20 to $80, and the same volume of the best traditionally made balsamic sells for the hard-to-get-one's-mind-around $1000, you can still get a pound of barrel-aged feta for a mere $15.

Unfortunately, about 99 percent of all feta that comes to the US — even from Greece — is aged in tins these days. But the traditional, and best, maturing is done in birchwood barrels. The barrels allow the cheese to breathe during the aging, enhancing the flavor and contributing a wonderful balance and complexity. And, although hardly anyone knows it (though you do now) better feta should be matured for a good six to nine months before it's made available for sale. Proper aging like this allows for the feta to undergo a "secondary fermentation" making for a creamier and more complexly flavored cheese. Visually you can see the signs that the secondary fermentation has taken place; a well-made feta should have a series of small eyes or holes speckled throughout. Every time I eat it I'm impressed anew with how nicely balanced it is — never salty, really rich, with a really long and pleasantly savory finish.

Can you really taste the difference? Of course you can! Compare a typical supermarket feta made from cow's milk to the artisan barrel aged sheep's milk stuff we're getting from Vasili Roussas and you'll taste the difference without even trying.

3. Make Feta An Every Day Eating Experience!
Yeah I know, feta is regularly featured in Greek salads, and also a lot in omelets. Both are excellent, and I eat 'em regularly. But the point for me is there's so much more to feta than those two classic dishes. And I'm not talking about made up stuff — I don't think Ferran Adria, said with all due respect, has deconstructed the Greek salad yet into roasted pepper foam (sorry, I'm just back from Spain so I've got it in my mind). I don't want to make too much noise about this but I'm not really sure why feta has stayed so accessibly priced when other sheep cheeses (with their very low yields and the bad dollar/Euro exchange) have shot up so much in recent years. But, all I really know is that it is both affordable and excellent!

There's feta with tomato sauce. Creamy, delicious with a slightly salty tang that melts (a little or a lot depending on how well integrated you want it) in the sauce. Easier still, when the good tomatoes start coming in this summer, you just cut up chunks of 'em, toss with some salt, some feta cubes, some fresh herbs (I like basil, thyme and/or mint), some olive oil, and let it stand for a bit. Then toss with hot pasta. When it's really at the height of the summer heat, this uncooked sauce is excellent. Cool. Easy. Good.

Let's see... there are all sorts of other options too... scrambled eggs with crumbled feta and a bit of pan-fried broccoli (I like it with the edges of the broccoli slightly browned) and some roasted peppers. Years ago I came on a Persian recipe that used it with spaghetti and lentils, spiced with cumin. It's delicious. It's traditional in Greece to eat feta with polenta (bobota) and in spreads. There are dozens of borekas (traditional phyllo dough pastries) filled with feta and various other fillings. For dinner it could be a dish of baked shrimp, tomatoes and feta. Get fresh shrimp, sauté 'em in the shell, remove, make a tomato sauce in the same pan, toss with pasta and some feta. It's also great with olive paste, or with finely chopped long hot green chiles. It's excellent with garlic and herbs. I really like it crumbled on a salad of spring arugula along with fried capers and olive oil.

Okay, then there's the most obvious of all and the easiest which is the Greek tradition of just putting a slice (the name "feta" actually means "slice" after all) out on a plate to eat with just about anything and everything. And, in this vein, there's definitely the marination thing — good olive oil, good feta cut into cubes, good herbs of your choosing and a couple hours to a couple days of time for the flavors to meld. I'm very high on the Moleon oil (see below) from the Greek village of Molai, a touch of sea salt and some flakes of red pepper (try the Maras red pepper from Turkey) and a grinding of fresh black pepper.

To my taste, great feta should also be appearing regularly on cheese boards. It's fantastic with fruit–I love the slightly salty richness of the cheese when it's set against the sweetness of ripe fruit. In Greece you'll often have it served with watermelon, which I'm sure sounds strange but really is fantastic (along with a little fresh mint — it's really great!) eat with grapes (the roasted grapes at the Roadhouse would be amazing). Again, it's delicious with dried fruit — dates, pears, apricots, raisins, currants, or figs. The creamy texture of the cheese on the tongue works amazingly well with the dense texture of the fruit.

Ending here, I'll take you back to the beginning of a good day of feta eating. If you go to Greece don't be surprised if you're served feta for breakfast. It's quite common that thick slices of it would be cooked 'til warm in a frying pan along with a couple of sunny side up eggs and wedges of fresh tomato, a sprinkling of sea salt and few flakes of red pepper.