Only open until 4PM on weekdays. They have a catalogue you can review and order from, but they won’t be able to give you a total until they pull your requested items from the back. That’s in case they don’t have some items based on production.
The folks here are so nice! They were so excited when I told them I was planning on making pizza with their cheese. One of the guys suggested making a juicy Lucy burger with their smoked mozzarella.
I’m in this neighborhood more often now so I may get my cheese from here more often.
But something I noticed is that the expiration dates at diStefano last longer than Gioia. The Gioia items have to be consumed within a week before it goes bad. The diStefano items I purchased expire towards the end of the month…and I made the purchase last week.
Cheese is quite delicious. Creamier than Gioia, I think. The white truffle has pieces of truffle in it and is very truffle-y. Maybe almost a little too much for me, but it’s not the oil nonsense so it’s already a win for me.
The cheese was successful on pizza. I used the smoked mozzarella for BBQ chicken pizzas.
a critical component of eating brown cheese is the use of the cheese slicer, which is one of the premier norwegian inventions, along with the paperclip
Earthen lunch. Made one of my biggest parenting mistakes by letting my kids convince me to order the XLB. I knew they would be frozen, premade and terrible. Like my Princeton Review instructor suggested many decades ago always go with your first instinct. Almost no broth and totally wrong flavor profile. Hard thick skins. Blah.
One of our new favorite dishes is the fried chicken cartilage. I especially like taking a big spoonful of the onion, scallion and jalapeño over some white rice.
First time ordering the Lu Sen Su. Very good. Not a ton of sea cucumbers but the sauce was delicious. I added to a green onion pancake with some hot sauce.
I feel that eating spicy foods, one has to do it consistently, much like staying in training. I found this out the hard way, upon having a Hunan meal after going some time without spicy food. When I was eating Sichuan and Hunan regularly, no problem.
The impression I’ve gotten is that the ability to consume spicy foods regularly erodes as you get older.
I know more than a couple sad Korean dads that have been banned from eating spicy foods by their doctors.
I realize it can vary from person to person, but I haven’t noticed any erosion in my spicy food tolerance as I’ve aged, and I might add that I seem to be aging physically in dog years. Granted I haven’t tackled Sichuan* or Hunan since the pandemic, but I’ve had plenty of spicy Indian and some other spicy items. No issue. And I often have a tender tummy, just not for spiciness, which actually seems to help mine.
I dunno, I must be the Keith Richards of spiciness.
