THIS BOOK IS FROM
FEO
TO YOU.
Thanks for all you are,
all you want to bee
and our work to make life better.
AN INTERACTIVE GOURMET ADVENTURE
Finding and Pairing the World’s Honeys & Cheeses
CARRYING THE LOAD
Honeybees do more than gather pollen. They are responsible for helping make 30% of the world’s food – a responsibility worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Delicious green gold!
Photo: PDPhoto.org
ANCIENT INDIA SACRED TEXT
Rig Veda 1:90:6-8
Let every wind that blows drop honey
Let the rivers and streams recreate honey
Let all our medicines turn honey
Let the dawn and evening be full of honey
Let the dark particles be converted to honey
Our nourisher, this sky above, be full of honey
Let our trees be honey
Let the Sun be honey
Let our cows secrete honey
YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW
1914, Cornell Extension Recommends How To Increase the Honey Supply,
“The beekeeper’s part in the present campaign of food preparedness is first to produce all he possibly can, and, secondly, to market it wisely and only after he has full information concerning the markets.”
2010 International Honey Market – Challenges & Opportunities:
“Firstly, we need to preserve the incentive to produce and the incentive to consume honey, and keep all segments of the industry, including producers, exporters and importers, packers, manufacturers, retailers and consumers functioning as healthy segments of this large interlaced network.”
Copyrighted/Protected © 2011
Published by: Allan Shore & Erick Martinez
Photographs and most other images in this publication are in the public domain or have been provided with permission of the owner/creative talent. If the item is in the public domain, we offered a verification link when possible. For images or items offered with permission, we try to provide a way to contact the owner. If you care to use any images or ideas, please contact the originators and respect applicable rights and restrictions.
We decided to take an approach that celebrates public domain creativity for two reasons. Buying original artwork can be prohibitively expensive, putting the book out of financial reach for many. Just as importantly, however, is the fact that apiarists (honey hivers) and specialty cheese artisans are typically invested in the whole idea of showcasing their skills. This book reflects and honors that motivation by practicing what they and we preach. If you discover we’ve made an error, send a note to HoneyCheesePairing@gmail.com. We hope the Green Gold project will be online in full glory in 2011, a part of which will include correcting errors as they are found.
Green Gold as a concept (using technology connectivity to share gourmet tasting and pairing pleasures) offers itself for use under the directives of the Creative Commons. This means that even though you may make use of the ideas and works offered here to grow the initiative, rights and privileges are retained by and for Allan Shore, Erick Martinez and, where applicable, Shirocos.com, a sole-proprietorship retail store in Benicia, CA.
Smashwords Digital Edition: License Notes
This book is available in print and ebook. The ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. Copies may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. For information on print editions, please visit our site, http://www.HoneyCheeseGuys.wordpress.com.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
12 Gourmet Gold
14 Green & Gold Creativity
16 Our Pairing Goals
18 Cheesey Mea Culpa
20 Blending Technologies
23 Hive Marketing & Computer Stickytuitivity
25 Roots of Honeys & Cheeses
27 Benicia Bights
31 The Language of Pairing
33 Starting the Matrix
35 Molten Gold
37 Honey Sommelier
40 Skinny on Cheese
46 Starting with Chocolate … Meet Cheese!
48 Whiskey, Please
52 Cheese Beer
58 Wining Cheeses
62 The Business of Honey
65 Weapons of Mass Appeal
71 Honey Money
74 Bee-Hind the Mask
76 Honey.com Central
85 Making the Matrix
88 Drizzle from Above
95 Honeys for Health
100 Digging for Gold
102 Honey Tech
104 Hive Marketing
107 Cheese Whiz(ard)s
110 Honey Whiz(ard)s
113 Honey Cheese-Do Marketing List
115 Investor Dollars
116 Global Impact 4 Bees
119 Appendix
Heightened Taste Cheese Pairing Guide
Wisconsin Dairy, Pairings that Please
Information Activism—10 Basics
Inventions & New Ideas from the Creative Minds of Bee Keepers
STARTING WITH HONEY
Four thousand years ago Egyptian royalty was mummified with honey and entombed with pots of what they thought of as the nectar of their gods, giving rise to the belief that honey and its lovers could last forever!
Photo: Honey.com with permission
ADDING THE CHEESE
Ancient writings and hieroglyphic cave drawings tell stories of how solidifying milk made it possible to keep their food edible longer.
Photo: EatWisconsinCheese.com with permission
Since you’ve discovered this book we know that you may already be drooling over the earthly pleasures and natural delights that honeys and cheeses have to offer. But hold tight. Green Gold is not just about the deliciousness of these two ingredients.
What we’re offering is really more of a treasure map. Even as you go crazy with the yummy photos and learn about these wonders, we’ll actually be setting up guidance and some directive that can lead you down a path toward a remarkable culinary and world food adventure. For the fact is that as much as we’d just love to feed you all the delights you can stand, there is more that is unknown about the riches of the world’s honeys and cheeses than is known, and there is almost nothing well documented about why these goodies go down even better together.
Green Gold: Pairing the World’s Honeys & Cheeses is the first book of its kind that gives you this type of menu of opportunities. As we mentioned earlier, that doesn’t make it a recipe collection, and it is not a comprehensive collection of the pairings of the world’s honeys and cheeses. Instead, it’s the beginning of a participatory learning and enjoyment process that will enable you to find and encourage others to share the world’s honeys and cheeses – a process that will turn you on to their secrets and make you one of the voices for making sure the entire world can get access to as much of these golden delights as possible. Without more knowledge about honeys and cheeses, we simply cannot yet do justice to what they have to offer us all.
Our mission is to begin the process of learning where the honeys and cheeses are and how (and why) they go together so very, very well!
Most people are unaware that there are really some 500 specialty cheeses and perhaps as many as 150 honey varieties. They also don’t know that each of these is a creative miracle of sorts, subject in its own way to the creative artistry of its harvesters or makers who draw their inspirations from the twists and turns of local terrior (like any fine wine, chocolate, whiskey or beer).
Our adventure into the precious mines of Green Gold provides you (and everyone else, we hope!) a foundation for discovering more about honeys and cheeses and a sense of direction for getting to the end of the rainbow. And we do that by starting the discussion, encouraging the experience and helping to offer a door (or portal actually, in computer terminology) for gaining access to all the more such pairings can provide. One of our first jobs is to encourage and oversee the development of a virtual pairing matrix that will become the buzz of excitement where enthusiasts can form a colony of sharers and explores.
Our interest in spearheading this hunt for Green Gold stems from many places. For sure, from our love of these incredible ingredients as foods we cannot ignore. But also from our realization that the world is at risk of losing their depth. Corporate and convenience forces are threatening to wash away their diversity in the name of profitability, much like the way that apples have lost their variety. Cheeses were placed in the international commodities market in 2010; honeys made suffer a similar fate soon at a time when large retail behemoths are trying to spin their own tale of why local honeys belong on their shelves.
Our goal is to generate such a rush toward natural Green Gold that honeys and cheeses will no longer be subject to these dangers. And they are true dangers. Plus, by marrying the two, the culinary, health, wellness and wealth potentials expound and we believe more and more people we see the value that await.
As we finished this update (May 2011), we’re completing the preparations for the second annual Honey & Cheese Pairing Festival in Benicia, California – the city that was likely instrumental in bringing these foods to the West Coast during the nation’s other Gold Rush. We hope to share with all how well that turned out and why we’re confident it’s be the beginning of a bigger and stickier mission of fun.
Enjoy a drizzle and a slice – preferably together. Then let us know more about what kinds you liked best and where you found them – no matter where they are currently hiding in on this planet. Soon, we may all be able to share your wealth!
Allan Shore, http://www.honeycheeseguys.wordpress.com
Erick Martinez, http://Shirocos.com
Brochure available with updates. Email HoneyCheesePairing@gmail.com.
GOURMET GOLD
A Truly Sustainable Investment
We started our adventure to find Green Gold because we like to eat honeys and cheeses. Pairing these treats was just a way to double those pleasures for personal delight. Only later would we learn of what other possibilities for health, wisdom and wealth these simple and common ingredients had to offer.
We soon learned, for example, that we could raise some charitable dollars by organizing our pairing festival. Even us being on “the water’s edge” of the great Napa and Sonoma valley had not yet inspired others to capture the pairing of these foods for this kind of gourmet evening of eating and giving. No one had ever thought of the idea.
Not long after that, as we did more research on the issues, we discovered that these products (local, healthy products) made for good retail items too. People love local honey and they love learning more about it and cheese. And we learned that the fact that our town had a major historical connection to bringing honeys and cheeses to the West Coast could add more interest – which we’ll discuss more later.
But to be fair, we can’t stop here. Honeys and cheeses are valuable commodities. People can and will make money on them, and they could well be products that can help small and struggling families, farms and even villages (mostly in emerging nations) work and earn their way out of their economic struggles. Honeys and cheeses are money, job and profit making goods. Or at least they can be if there is adequate marketing, support and sales capacities for those who want to be their own entrepreneurs – something that contemporary social advances in communication and connectivity can surely help with.
All of which has gotten us to the money value of honeys and cheeses and pairing them for a better return on our collective investments. Double and triple bottom line approaches – those that seek to pair the best of for- and nonprofit models – have a place in this adventure too, and we’re committed to ensuring that honeys and cheeses don’t get lost in the social responsibility of Impact Investing!
Photo: PDPhoto.org
GREEN & GOLDEN CREATIVITY
In order to realize the money potential, however, one first needs to understand that honeys and cheeses are not just what we think they are. Honey is so much more than the golden nectar that comes in the plastic bear bottle; and cheese is an exploration of creative talents far greater than can be represented in inexpensive yellow or white convenience slices in a grocery store. We believe these characterizations because of what the food industry has told us. But there is more to know and more to learn.
Honeys and cheeses have helped keep the gourmet sector afloat during the current tough economic times. And it is very likely that the local food and even the Slow Food and Slow Money movements will embrace these ingredients to inspire their own anti-hunger, good-eating and even anti-obesity initiatives. But this kind of creativity is still out of reach for many people.
Right now, we want to give you an amuse bouche (a free sample featuring the chef’s choice) of the tasty interests that are already finding their way to our table of opportunities. For example, the following quote came from Ron Phipps of the American Honey Association. He delivered it in February 2010 as part of his Honey Market Report, http://www.AmericanHoneyProducers.org:
The industry as a whole longs for and needs a level playing field with a better integration of the interests of producers, packers and consumers. A significant improvement in the marketing of honey would greatly benefit everyone in the industry. Green products, of which honey is one, represent a significant trend. The growing emphasis upon varietals is a second factor, and the ability to link consumption of natural foods with health benefits is a third and perhaps the most promising. America has seen this occur with almonds, blueberries, tea, chocolates, wine, etc. It is honey’s turn.
We agree and we expect to showcase this by keeping honeys and cheeses in the forefront of the innovation trends. You’ll begin to see why as we continue giving honeys and cheeses their turns.
One of the few photos we purchased because it is so perfect in its message.
Artist Vyacheslav Dodonov for Worth1000.com.
Reproduced with permission
OUR PAIRING GOALS
If you can’t tell it yet, we think cheeses and honeys are too good to eat alone. Which is why we’re heads over tails in love with pairing them for all they have to offer. But there is no denying the fact that this won’t be as easy as it sounds. We tend to have a more singular mindset; maybe even a more singular stomach set. Not until most recently have we begun to see how much food fusion has to offer. We’re beginning to learn more about putting foods together in different ways in no small part because of entertainment media outlets like FoodTV. (We hope to spin-off an option on this for Green Gold as well.)
Green Gold tries to reset the table to overcome the single-mindedness prejudice and rests on the idea that massive numbers of others will soon see why. It is our appetizer to you to get you to want and discover more. And that’s why we’re starting by serving up a lot of little bites (using bytes) to get the culinary adventures started; the rest of what flows naturally will follow in the courses that we all design together.
Green Gold as a concept will then become a vehicle for delivering more and more servings. Access is key. People have to know where to find local honeys and cheeses, which is what the pairing matrix is all about. Only then will we be able to form a “followship” of enthusiasts who can turn their own abilities and desires to the task of unearthing other pairing possibilities.
If we are to succeed in this, you will be able to get a honey from any one point on earth and pair it in a reasonable time with a cheese from somewhere else. Anywhere else, actually. Maybe one item from the northern, cold nations; another from the southern-most warm spaces. We discuss some of the specifics of this later in these pages.
Technology will make this possible and the people of the world will make us all want it to happen. We trust that Green Gold Version 2.0 will be the collection of recipes and paring treasures to keep the excitement growing.
Photos and Graphics: Public-Domain-Images.com
CHEESEY MEA CULPA
We try throughout this book to fairly balance our representations of information for each of our two targeted commodities. A slice of what is known and loved of cheeses; a drizzle or two of what is loved of honeys. Nothing is as frustrating as having too much cheese and not enough honey, or vice-versa.
But it’s too true that cheeses and the cheese industry have a larger presence in the gourmet food sector than do honeys; they just do. Ask any California cow!
As such, we don’t feel entirely out of line about trying to balance this out somewhat by giving more space to the honey side of this teeter-totter. People probably know less about honeys than they think they do about cheeses.
Still, it is important to make sure that people have a taste of cheese on their mind when prospecting for Green Gold. All the wonders that cheeses promise are important in understanding why they pair well with certain honeys. The flavors of both products vary as a result of their origins, and they likely change when put together with another ingredient that is likewise an artistic inspirations. Flavors change when pairings occur, and the reasons one or another cheese is selected will guide you into determine which honeys to gamble on.
You’ll find a good overview of cheeses in various ways within this book, but we thought it might be worth pointing toward a few other good sources of information to get you started. Below are a few places where we gathered input. Look to them for guidance and as a palate reminder as you go:
WISDAIRY.COM & REALCALIFORNIAMILK.COM: Fun advertising campaigns by the California Milk Advisory Board and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board have generated great sites. Check these out. Some of the images we use are from Wisconsin and we learned a lot about cheese history from the creative California people.
AN APP 4 FROMAGE (See http://www.databaseconstructs.com/fromage.html): We’ve been watching and are familiar with some Internet resources. A new “app” called Fromage was just created for the iPhone and is gathering acceptance. It seems worth watching what kind of buzz it creates.
CHEESE LOVER’S COMPANION: We relied on an early document published in 1953 called Cheese Varieties. It remains a great resource and is downloadable from the Nattional Agricultural Library (http://Naldr.Nal.USDA.gov). Another print book is called The Cheese Lover’s Companion: The Ultimate A-to-Z Cheese Guide, written by Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst. It too offers good descriptors of the textures, fragrances and flavors of cheeses, which will help in determining how well they go with different honeys.
Photo: EatWisconsinCheese.com. With permission.
BLENDING TECHNOLOGIES
“The art of cheese making is a delicate balance-an intricate, seductive dance-between the worlds of nature, science and art. A craft meticulously mastered by the world’s cheesemakers. “
Sharon Tyler Herbst, Introduction, The Cheese Lover’s Companion, 2007.
Honeys and cheeses are not the same thing. We have to remember this from the beginning, even if it seems kind of silly to point out. Because there is a reason for saying it: They each come about through natural transformative processes that make strangely comparable uses of nature’s physical and biological “technologies” – technologies that, as it turns out, play well with the other kinds of technologies we’re more accustom to thinking about in these computer-heavy days. So it is necessary to look at both sides of this technological pairing as we go.