Fat Bottom Girl’s quirk becomes virtue
Julia Child once said that she never apologized to dinner guests when a dish didn’t turn out. She just renamed it. Sebastopol cheesemaker Seana Doughty has the same make-do instinct, which explains how a problem cheese became the flagship for her company, Bleating Heart Dairy.
Distracted by another chore, Doughty failed to flip the moist, fresh wheels on schedule, an essential step in producing a uniform cylinder. By the time she returned to the flipping, the wheels were noticeably wider on the bottom. Rather than rue her mistake, Doughty decided to make the quirk a virtue.
Christened Fat Bottom Girl, after a Queen song, a 2-pound wheel of this aged sheep’s milk cheese is now intentionally wider at the base. It gives Doughty a story to tell.
But the bigger story is how quickly Doughty has become an accomplished cheesemaker. She and her husband moved from San Diego to Sebastopol in 2009 to pursue her fantasy of making sheep’s cheese. Unable to find enough milk to purchase (it’s a rare commodity), she purchased some dairy sheep from Wisconsin instead.
This season, her fourth as a cheesemaker, she and her partners are milking 75 ewes, up from 10 two years ago. That’s enough milk to make about 150 wheels of Fat Bottom Girl each week, in addition to the two other cheeses in her repertoire.
Working with raw milk and traditional artisan methods, Doughty was inspired by both young Italian pecorinos and French Basque sheep’s milk cheeses.
Matured for two months and washed regularly with brine, Fat Bottom Girl develops a hard natural rind and a firm, straw-colored interior. I love the fragrance and the buttery flavor and think Doughty has nailed the salt level. The texture is a tad rubbery for my taste, neither as silky nor as creamy as Basque beauties like Abbaye de Belloc, nor as pleasantly crumbly as some of the Italian pecorinos.
Look for Fat Bottom Girl at Molsberry Market, Cowgirl Creamery, Rainbow Grocery, Cal-Mart and Falletti Foods in San Francisco; Sigona’s Farmers Market in Palo Alto;
Star Grocery in Berkeley; Woodlands Market in Kentfield; Oxbow Cheese Merchant in Napa; V. Sattui in St. Helena; CalMart in Calistoga; Epicurean Connection in Sonoma.
The cheese has enough elegance and flavor intensity to pair with an older Cabernet Sauvignon, such as the 2002 Revana Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, a refined wine with mature aromas and smooth tannins.
Next up: Crémeux des Cîteaux, a triple-cream cow’s milk cheese from France.