Breast-Milk Cheese ― The Ultimate in Local Sourcing?

chefdanielangerer.typepad.com

The chef's freezer, stocked with bags of his wife's breast milk.

​The word "locavore" and its associated meanings had a whole hive's worth of buzz last year. The honey dripping forth has fueled a steady flow of area restaurants keen on demonstrating the viability and deliciousness of the movement ― with well-publicized devotion. Radius comes to mind. Soon to open in the old Julie's Supperclub space on Folsom, the eatery will source ingredients grown, raised, and produced within 100 miles of the city.

An admirable intent, for sure, but Austrian-born, New York-based chef Daniel Angerer, in possession of what he demurely describes as "rather natural" cooking instincts, has most locavores smoked like a summer sausage. Last month, he posted on his blog a new cheese recipe using milk sourced not from happy goats, sheep, or cows nibbling away at green tufts on nearby farms, but from his wife's breasts. With a freezer full of excess bagged mother's milk, Angerer messed around with a few dishes, variations on his hyper-local cheese with beets and romaine, maple, pumpkin, and texturized Concord grapes, and dehydrated porcini mushroom powder with burned onion chutney, respectively.

Something tells us he's getting a lot of e-mails about this from dreamy placenta-eaters, waste-not gourmands, perverts, and techno-emotional chefs. Breast milk cheese ― that's taking folks far, far, far back ― past a succession of offices, lovers, schools, blurrier and blurrier, people, places, and moments gauzy and faint, all the way to memory lane's on-ramp: wretchedly stinky diapers, Grandpa leaning over the crib, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and that first meal of all.