How often is the cow fed grass?
Newborns are often let out to graze on pasture but are then later confined and restricted to a poor diet. Look out for a new term we’ve been hearing that refers more to meat than to cheese, “grass-finished,” which means that the animal ate grass throughout the entirety of its life. • Is the farm practicing organic? Just because the animal is grass-fed doesn’t mean that they’re not consuming industrial pesticides. With all of this said, the milk from a truly pasture-raised, free roaming, grass-fed animal has a greater probability of expressing the unique idiosyncrasies of the land from which it came. If the cheese is made from raw milk, you’ll likely pick up even more of the environmental variation throughout a season. The time of year can often be to blame if a cheese tastes flat or innocuous. Find out how long the cheese was aged and rewind. Was there fresh grass or foliage during that month? Or perhaps the cheese was made in the winter from frozen milk. Particularly with goat cheeses
