In the Old Town warehouse of Tekla, Inc., Sofia Solomon gingerly unwraps, several giant pyramids of Pointe de Bique, a goat cheese from the Loire Valley in France. Next to the wrinkly, golden-hued pyramids that have been aged 30 days, a group of similarly shaped but moldy specimens rests in a wooden crate, resembling something you might find in the back of your refrigerator after several weeks of neglect-splotchy, discolored, and somewhat deflated from the humidity. Solomon offers me a taste of the moldy cheese, which has already begun to ooze after 45 days of aging. “On cheeses, molds are good,” she says. “The more you age, the more complex the characteristics.” In this case, the older cheese is nuttier, with a more pronouncedly acidic aftertaste. “The mold acts as a skin,” she says. “it allows the inside to develop more… it’s like putting a coat on.”
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Solomon his been educating cheese lovers for the past 20 years, since she and her husband, E. Leonard Solomon, started a modest wholesaling business out of their home. Tekla, named after Sofias Ukrainian mother, has grown steadily the past two decades to become the largest importer of specialty cheese and caviar in Chicago, supplying most of the city’s finer restaurants and gourmet food markets. But Solomon says she’d probably still be in bookkeeping if she hadn’t met Leonard in the mid-1960s.
In their cozy Old Town coach house, the Solomons began stockpiling tins of caviar, as well as smoked salmon, eel, sturgeon, and foie gras, to sell to a few select customers. Weekly shipments started heading out to the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton and Ambria from their tiny, four-by-five-foot cooler.
Now, Plasse buys cheese from small producers in France, which is aged and cured under her supervision in Lyon, then packed by trained affineurs at the airport for shipment to O’Hare, where it’s unloaded and trucked–still crated–to Tekla’s warehouse. “They’re living, breathing things” says Sofia. “Not Kraft slices. They give off gases; they need to be handled carefully.”
