Gently aged goat cheese laced with green peppercorns
This goat cheese is one of my longtime favorite foods that we craft right here at ZCoB. Detroit Street Brick is encased in a thin, velvety white rind, dotted with bits of dried green peppercorn from the Cardamom Mountains of India. The creamy softness of the goat cheese contrasts beautifully with the citrusy spiciness of the green peppercorns.
The cheese, which is made in a brick shape, is named for the bricks on Detroit Street, out front of the Deli. In the final decades of the 19th century city surveyors here in Ann Arbor were digging into the benefits to be accrued by starting to put bricks down atop the town’s dirt roads. Set in the early 1890s, the bricks were a popular and much-praised innovation, put in to replace the messy mud and dirt streets that were then the norm. And, I would imagine, they were an upgrade that could well have contributed to the decision that Rocco and Katherine Disderide made a decade or so later to build what’s now the Deli’s building.
It makes a great grilled cheese—I think it goes particularly well with the Bakehouse’s Sicilian Sesame Semolina! I love it melted onto pasta—the Creamery has some lumache (snail-shaped) from Rustichella d’Abruzzo on the shelves that would work well with it. And, of course, you can just eat it as is! Terrific on a slice of toasted Walnut Sage bread from the Bakehouse.
