Ithaca’s Evmeos needs strong milk to make
A special blue cheese, the brand new inspiration of Chrysanthos Karavias
Spring milk, in order to have the necessary strength of flavor, mainly from sheep; a little goat's milk used as seasoning; and a puzzle that took two years to solve to tame the fungus, give us the label Evmeos, the brand new inspiration of resourceful Ithaca cheese maker, Chrysanthos Karavias.
A creamy blue cheese
Evmeos is a blue cheese, creamy and aromatic as soon as it has been left out of the fridge for an hour, made from pasteurized sheep's milk. Chrysanthos Karavias wanted to make it as soon as he saw how penicillin "worked" on the Tsemberis cheese in his cave. "I wanted to put the fungus in from the beginning so it's controllable, because once penicillin starts growing on its own on the cheese, then it becomes uncontrollable," he explains.
The cheese is quite rare, found in just three places in Athens and one in Nafplio, since this year is its maiden trip to the market, with minimal quantities available — only 80 heads.
"I like to make my milk into a single cheese rather than making four kinds of cheese from the same milk," the creator of Ithaca's Poem says. Chrysanthos makes cheese for four months each year using the prized milk produced by Katseno, the ancient breed of sheep that graze freely in Ithaca.
February and spring
As he explains, Evmeos requires "strong milk." So, Chrysanthos makes cheese using the first milk produced in February and spring. Unlike Tsemberis, the two-month maturation period doesn’t take place in a cave but in a special chamber, since temperature, humidity, and all factors that contribute to the creation of the cheese must be stable and completely controlled.
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