Grazin Girl Gorgonzola

This cheese has a rustic, basket weave exterior while the interior is a buttery color along with blue streaks and patches throughout.

It’s dense, buttery and crumbly with flavors of salted nuts, with tasty notes of sweet cream and peppery blue. It comes closer to a robust Stilton, with its natural rind and mellow finish. t spreads smoothly and melts on the tongue.

A perfect mellow blue for salads or drizzled with honey!

It is amazing in salads, sauces, and it is exquisite drizzled with a little honey.

Eat it!

Using a needle, each wheel is pierced by hand in order to allow for the slow development of blue streaking throughout the cheese. It’s dense, buttery and crumbly with flavors of salted nuts, sweet cream and peppery blue. A perfect mellow blue for salads or drizzled with honey!

Moreda, a graduate of Cal Poly’s dairy science program, is the fifth generation to work on his family’s century-old dairy farm. His Swiss-Italian great great-grandfather settled in Valley Ford, in scenic western Sonoma County, in 1918. Moreda’s mother, Karen Bianchi-Moreda, a former physical-education teacher, bought a home-cheesemaking kit ten years ago, hoping to create a role for herself on the farm.

Her two creations—the delightful Estero Gold and Highway One—have made the cheesemaking enterprise a success. Now her two boys are stepping into their own roles—Joe as cheesemaker and Jim, who studied animal husbandry at Cal Poly and grazing practices in New Zealand, as the cow guy and pasture expert. All three cheeses are made exclusively with the farm’s raw Jersey milk.

Joe moves Grazing Girl into a detached aging room on day two. That’s where the four-pound wheels are hand salted and, after seven days, pierced with needles to provide air and activate the blue mold.

Moreda says he nailed the recipe 18 months ago but the cheese was peaking at 30 days, a month too young for legal raw-milk cheese. He had to figure out how to slow it down. He got a lot of advice from Kuba Hemmerling, the cheesemaker at nearby Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese, which produces two blues. That’s the generous California spirit. Now Valley Ford is releasing Grazing Girl at three months.