What an Importer Does
Essex St. Cheese doesn't make cheese. It selects it, and everything about the company follows from that. Daphne Zepos founded the company in New York in 2006 and sold exactly one thing from a stall at the Essex Street Market on Delancey Street: Comté aged at Fort St. Antoine. Two decades later the list has grown, but barely. The company still imports only a handful of European wheels, on the theory that a short list tasted properly beats a long one bought on paper.
The selection method is where they part company with most importers. Comté is normally bought by age — 12 months, 18 months, 24 — because age is a number a buyer can specify from an office in another country. Essex St. buys on flavor instead, sending someone to the cave to taste and choose specific wheels, then accounting for how those wheels will change during the weeks they spend crossing the Atlantic. The cheese is meant to arrive at its peak, with none of the flat months that follow a long stint in a warehouse.
That approach costs more and yields less, which is why the catalog stays short. It also explains why these wheels turn up at serious cheese counters and almost nowhere else: the volumes are too small and the handling too particular for general distribution.
The Makers Behind the Label
Three producers account for most of what you'll find here.
Fromagerie l'Amuse is Betty Koster's operation in the Netherlands, founded in 1989 with her husband Martin and run out of two shops near Amsterdam. Koster is an affineur: she buys young wheels from Dutch farms and ages them herself, famously at warmer temperatures than the Dutch standard. That choice is what produces the Signature Gouda's caramel depth and its crunch of tyrosine crystals. Her exports reach America exclusively through Essex St. The aged Dutch Gouda here comes from her cellars, as does Brabander, a goat's milk Gouda made in Brabant from Saanen milk that tastes of nuts and hay with a faint gaminess underneath.
Marcel Petite ages Comté at Fort St. Antoine, a nineteenth-century military fort in the Jura mountains converted into a cheese cellar and now holding well over a hundred thousand wheels. Plenty of importers buy Comté from that address. Essex St. is the one that shows up to taste, several times a year, alongside the cellarmaster. For anyone drawn to that register of cheese, the wider alpine cheeses cover the same territory.
Finca Sierra de la Solana is a farm in La Mancha where the Essex Manchego is made from the milk of the estate's own Manchega sheep. It is a farmhouse cheese in the strict sense, which most supermarket Manchego is not, and it sits alongside the rest of the Manchego collection.
What This Selection Is Good For
These are cheeses to eat on their own, with a knife and some bread and nothing much else. The aged Goudas need nothing on the plate beside them, though a glass of something dark helps: a Tawny, a bourbon, a Belgian dubbel. Brabander is the exception in the group and the one to reach for if you like goat's milk cheeses but find fresh chèvre too tangy; the long aging turns the goat character into something rounder and sweeter.
On a board, one Essex St. wheel is usually enough. They are assertive enough to organize everything around them, so build outward with milder company and keep two of them off the same board. Comté and Manchego both slice cleanly and behave well at room temperature, which makes either a reasonable anchor for a larger spread. Several of these are raw milk cheeses, which is part of why they taste the way they do. Give any of them an hour out of the refrigerator before serving; the aromatics that justify the price only show up near room temperature.
Also Worth Exploring
Essex St. is one of several importers and affineurs whose work turns up in our cheese counter, and the selection here is deliberately narrow. For cheeses that have taken honors at national and international competitions, the award-winning cheeses collection gathers them in one place. And for everything else, from the Dutch and Spanish traditions represented here to the ones that aren't, the wider cheese counter is where to browse.
Essex St. Cheese: Frequently Asked Questions