By Janet Fletcher

With tomatoes and cucumbers ready to harvest and Greek Salad season in full swing, specialty food retailers can expect a spike in demand for feta. Knowing more about this ancient cheese—where it comes from, how it’s made and how to handle it—can make cheese department staffers more comfortable talking about it and more successful selling it.

Feta, or something like it, has been made in the Balkans for centuries, probably as long as there have been Balkan shepherds tending goats and sheep. By heavily salting their cheese, farmers made it last through the winter months, when the female animals were being bred and not giving milk. Feta, the Greek word for slice, is the cheese’s modern name, according to Diane Kochilas, the Greek food authority. In earlier times, it may have simply been known as barrel cheese or white cheese. The Bulgarian name for feta, sirene, means white cheese.

Feta production is relatively simple, which partly explains why so many countries make it. Greece, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Denmark, Israel, Germany and the U.S. all produce feta, although not equally well. Most specialty food retailers tend to stick with the products of Greece, Bulgaria and France, widely recognized as the quality leaders.

You can make feta with milk from cows, sheep or goats, but the best-tasting includes a large proportion of rich, high-fat sheep’s milk. In Greece, where herds are usually mixed, farmers would often blend goat’s and sheep’s milk for feta. Greek law now specifies that the country’s feta must be at least 70 percent sheep’s milk and a maximum of 30 percent goat’s milk, reflecting the importance of sheep’s milk to the final texture and flavor.

The Bulgarian feta available in the U.S. is made from sheep’s milk and a yogurt culture, which produces a particularly tangy result. French feta, also from sheep’s milk, is typically milder, creamier and less salty than either Greek or Bulgarian types. It is made in the same region as Roquefort and is, in a way, a by-product of that famous blue cheese. To avoid flooding the market with Roquefort, French producers began turning excess sheep’s milk into feta; the brined cheese now accounts for about 20 percent of production. In fact, the dominant French feta brand in the U.S., Valbreso, is made by the same firm that produces Société, the largest Roquefort brand.

Feta in Brine
In traditional feta production, the salted curds are placed in large round molds to drain. (In Greece, the drained whey is used for manouri, a fresh cheese.) When firm enough to cut, each round is sliced into three thick triangles. The triangles are then packed tightly in barrels (the traditional method) or in tins (the modern method), with salt between the layers. The container is topped with brine and the feta cures for at least a month or two and sometimes longer. The Mt. Vikos feta from Greece cures in barrel for four months. Some producers ship the feta in the original brine. Others repack it with fresh brine. The brine acts as a preservative and keeps the cheese moist; without it, feta’s shelf- life is greatly shortened.

“It should be submerged or it dries out,” says Charlie Vergiris of Krinos Foods, a Greek food importer. “Once you start removing pieces (from the container), the brine level goes down, and you need to supplement with additional brine.”

At the Oakville Grocery in Palo Alto, Calif., cheese department head Kathleen Wolf replaces the producer’s brine with her own, a solution of about three-quarter cup kosher salt to 1 quart water. “We like to start fresh,” says Wolf. “There’s nothing wrong with using the brine it comes in, but it’s cloudy and not attractive. It’s a little yellow, and under fluorescent lights it starts to look weird.”

Initially, the staff put small tubs of pre-cut feta in the main cheese case, but the tubs would occasionally tip over and leak. Then Wolf tried keeping feta in a bowl in the charcuterie case, but any corner of cheese not completely immersed would quickly get funky. Now the store pre-cuts 1/4- to 1/2-pound pieces, packs them in pint tubs, weighs them, then adds brine. The tubs are overwrapped with a plastic bag for spill protection and kept in a reach-in refrigerator. Employees cut larger pieces to order from the bulk containers in the walk-in.

Whipped with Olive Oil
Some stores package pre-cut feta in plastic wrap without any brine. As long as the cheese sells quickly and customers use it within a few days, quality shouldn’t suffer. But brine immersion is preferable. “The worst thing you can do is add plain water,” says Ron Cardoos, who markets Mt. Vikos feta in the U.S. Water will draw salt out of the cheese, leaving it tasteless, and the texture will soon break down. If you don’t have enough brine to immerse the cheese, then turn the cheese frequently, advises Cardoos. Use clean stainless steel tongs, never bare hands, which introduce bacteria that could spoil the brine.

Feta lends itself to value-added preparations in the cheese case and deli department. Cardoos says that Wegman’s, the East Coast supermarket chain, marinates Mt. Vikos feta with extra virgin olive oil, peppercorns and herbs, adding instructions for roasting it as an appetizer. Feta can be whipped with olive oil, garlic, oregano and hot peppers to make the spicy cheese spread known in Greece as htipiti. And feta never met a summer vegetable it didn’t like, harmonizing splendidly with tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, eggplant, zucchini and sweet peppers.

In 2002, Greece won a long, hard-fought battle to get European Union Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status for its feta. Although Denmark and Germany argued that feta had become a generic term, and that their versions, often made with cow’s milk, should qualify for the name, they lost their case. After a five-year grace period, only feta produced in designated areas of Greece by strictly defined methods will bear the name feta.

Similar cheeses from elsewhere—even “feta” from Crete—will be known as…who knows? But expect to see new names for this age-old cheese in coming years.

Janet Fletcher writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and is the author of The Cheese Course.