SAN FRANCISCO — “Always taste from mild to wild,” proclaims Caitlin O’Neill, a certified cheese professional with The Cheese School of San Francisco.
We scribble the edict in our tasting notes, next to “cheddar is a noun and a verb” and “don’t eat the rind, if it smells like cat box,” trying for the hundredth time not to inhale every cheese on our plates, including a lush, rare French blue with origins in Roman times.
This is Cheese 101, an introduction to the fascinating world of preserved milk. We’re perched on the second floor of the school’s new digs at Daily Driver in the Dogpatch, the city’s only organic creamery, and hanging on O’Neill’s every word. A curd nerd of the highest order, she has taught classes on cheese in 40 states. Thirty minutes in, and we already know the anatomy of a triple cream, the name of the crunchy thingies in gouda — tyrosine crystals — and sparkling wine’s “scrubbing bubbles” effect on the palate.
