Tangra Group LLC

Monday October 28, 9:33 AM ET

By David Rosengarten, Editor-in-Chief

Some years ago, I had a feta epiphany: sure, Greek feta is the one you think of first--but in my tasting experience feta cheese from Bulgaria was always coming out on top. Its principal winning quality was a rich, almost creamy texture that the Greek feta rarely had. So I made the mental switch, and started to rely on Bulgarian feta--for a few years. Then I started finding that the quality of the Bulgarian was going downhill! Recently, I discovered that it wasn't just my imagination. According to a good friend in the cheese business, the fall of communism precipitated the fall of Bulgarian feta: with less government regulation, the Bulgarian cheese-makers were substituting cow's milk for sheep's milk, and taking short cuts, leading to an inferior feta product. Packages that came here continued to say "sheep's milk"--but, according to my friend, it was a lie; he told me that the bulk price of Bulgarian feta in the U.S. nose-dived (down about 70%!), because buyers lost all confidence in it. A thousand years of feta-making--gone with a wave of the hand.

Fast forward to 2002, and a company with a dual address on their letterhead: the Tangra Group, of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Tangra swears with a hard-to-doubt passion that they have restored the integrity to Bulgarian feta. They are making theirs from 100% sheep's milk, obtained from sheep grazing on grass in the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria. The shepherds are using the venerated L. Bulgaricus starter, and aging the cheese for 60 days, they say. It comes to you in brine--which, they say, keeps the cheese fresh. I say: After tasting their product, I believe every word Tangra speaks! For this is not only Bulgarian feta restored to respectability.....this is the greatest Bulgarian feta I've ever tasted! My friend in the cheese business, who hasn't yet tasted this product, was skeptical. "Is it bright white?" he asked. I told him "yes" and held my breath. "Good," he said. "Cow's milk feta is a little yellow. Does it have an acidic tang?" "Yes," I said. "Good. Cow's milk doesn't." But it's more than the color and the tang that got me. It is wonderfully creamy and velvety--at the same time, still crumbly like feta. It has an insane level of sheepy taste, making it the most flavorful feta I've ever tasted from anywhere. And it has a high salt content, shielding it from any charges of blandness. In fact, that salt content may be the one downside for some people. So if you'd like it to be less salty, simply immerse a thick slice in room-temperature water for 20 minutes. I've been doing this myself--because the soak seems to make the cheese even creamier, and to emphasize the sheepy flavor. Fabulous by itself or in salads (see sidebar).

The great new Tangra Bulgarian Feta is being imported and distributed by:

Tangra Group LLC
11 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
917.498.8889 (cell phone)
800.249.0272
info@tangragroup.com
www.tangragroup.com
Contact: George Stratev

Tangra Bulgarian Feta is available in some stores right now (call George
Stratev to find out if it's in a store near you). I've tracked down two
stores for you:

* At Zabar's, In Manhattan, the in-store price for the cheese is $4.79 a
pound (a great price). If you can't get to the store, they will ship it to
you--but, in addition to the overnight shipping charges, they will add a
$7.50 handling fee.

Zabar's
2245 Broadway
New York, NY 10024
800.697.6301 (toll-free)
212.496.1234 (tel)
212.580.4477 (fax)

* At Murray's Cheese Shop, also in Manhattan, the in-store price is $ 6.99
per pound, and the price for shipped cheese is $7.99 per pound. BUT.....there
are two key factors here that make a purchase from Murray's very attractive:

1) There's no handling charge for the shipping. And you have your choice of
overnight or 2nd-day (which is much cheaper).

2) Best of all: If you're a member of Rosengarten's Table, Murray's will give
you a free second pound of the Bulgarian feta! This is, in effect, a
half-price deal! You can get this great deal either by buying the cheese in
the store (show your Rosengarten's Table card when you're there), or by
ordering the cheese on the phone to be shipped (speak with Amy or Frank when
you call, and give them your serial#.)

Murray's Cheese shop
257 Bleecker Street
New York, NY, 10014
888.692.4339 (toll-free)
212.243.3289 (tel)
212.243.5001 (fax)
www.murrayscheese.com

The Rosengarten Report is a 20-page, passionately written newsletter that helps you make the most of your culinary life. To learn more about it, visit http://www.DavidRosengarten.com

David Rosengarten is a host on the Food Network TV every weekday at 9:30am. He is a frequent guest on NBC’s Today Show.

NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE

March 3 — Join me in a toast to our newest allies, the Bulgarians! Actually, I’m way ahead of you in the toasting department. About an hour ago, I cracked open a bottle of Chateau Boriana 2000, a little merlot out of the Tracian Valley that I like to call the “rascal of the vineyard.”

STARTED GETTING into Bulgarian wines a few weeks ago, when the French started opposing us in the United Nations Security Council. Don’t get me wrong, I oppose the impending war with Iraq and think that the French and Germans have legitimate reasons beyond their normal anti-Americanism for trying to block us.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t embrace our new ally, Bulgaria. This is a true friend of America—unlike Turkey, whom we had to buy off; Spain, who are aligning with the U.S. just really doing it just to get back at the French; or England, with whom we practically share a language. You know that old expression, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”? Well, that’s Bulgaria in a nutshell! In the midst of this worldwide tide of anti-Americanism, this is a country that picked up its metaphorical surfboard and said, “We’re totally stoked, dude!”
Bulgaria actually seems to like us. I mean really like us—in that Sally Field way.
And I like them right back. In fact, the mere mention of Bulgaria brings to mind Will Rogers’s famous axiom: I have, indeed, never met a Bulgarian I didn’t like. Think about your own experiences with these exotic people of the East(ern Europe). I’ll bet you’ve never met a Bulgarian who wasn’t charming, demure and, to top it off, a fantastic dancer.
So that’s why I’ve started showing my support through copious consumption of Chateau Boriana. Sure, you French-wine-drinking snobs may scoff, but repeated tastings of Chateau Boriana revealed an extremely drinkable red—and when I say “extremely drinkable,” I mean that exactly the same amount of Chateau Boriana merlot was required to get me as messed up as I get on the genuine French stuff. At $5.99 a bottle, you do the geopolitics.
And how about a little cheese to go with your wine? Those America-bashers may enjoy their chablis and brie, but I’ll take my Chateau Boriana with a few hunks of Bulgaria’s delightful sheep’s-milk kaskaval—an ethereal cross between sharp cheddar and provalone.
And Bulgaria also exports some of the world’s best feta—which really comes in handy right now, as the Greeks seem to be siding with “old Europe.” In fact, Bulgaria is the only thing standing in the way of Greece’s effort to turn the very term “feta” into their own monopoly, like (oh the irony) the French and Champagne.
In reality, the style of cheese we commonly know as “feta” was invented in the Trakia peninsula, which is now in Southern Bulgaria. Admittedly, my Bulgarian friends were foolish to call their version “white cheese,” while the Greeks created a mystique by using the word “feta”—but that doesn’t change the fact that Bulgarian feta is the best in the world. And that’s not the Chateau Boriana talking!
“Bulgarian feta is becoming more and more popular,” said Olga Dominguez, the cheese buyer at Zabar’s. Despite its location in the heart of New York’s liberal Upper West Side, Zabar’s is experiencing a bit of a rush on Bulgarian cheeses right now.
“Even in this neighborhood, people are saying that they don’t want to buy French cheese right now,” Dominguez said.
Why stop at wine and cheese? If you like eggplant, red peppers, green tomatoes and onions, you’re already a lover of Bulgarian cuisine. In fact, the entirety of Bulgarian cuisine seems to consist of those four ingredients mixed in different quantities. Ajvar? Go heavy on the red peppers and lay off the green tomatoes. Danubian salad? Go heavy on the green tomatoes and go light on eggplant. And the Bulgarians treat eggplant the way George Washington Carver treated peanuts. They fry it, roast it, grill it, bake it, mash it and puree it.
If you’re mouth isn’t watering, it will be soon. Thanks to our new alliance—and the fact that a decade without a Soviet sugar daddy has left Bulgarians hungry for more than just friendship—Bulgarian imports will soon be flooding the American market.
“You can’t touch them price-wise,” said Stan Mazepa, owner of Pulaski, a food company that imports Bulgarian roasted peppers. “Italian roasted peppers may be a marginally better, but they’re three times the price.”
And you know how Americans love a bargain—more so ever since it looked like Italy’s support in the U.N. was waning. One man behind the coming Bulgarian invasion is George Stratev, who has organized farming cooperatives to ensure that the riches of the Valley of Thrace and the Rhodope Mountains starts flowing toward the West. Next up—Bulgarian yogurt.
“It’s fantastic,” Stratev said. “You’ve never had yogurt like this. It has a live culture, lb bulgaricus, that acts on the lactose in the milk. It’s perfect if you’re lactose intolerant! It’s a yogurt that actually improves your digestive flow. Most yogurts can’t make that claim!”
Stratev is based in New York, and, as such, hob-nobs with Bulgarian diplomats who tell him that they’ll stick with the U.S. come hell or rejection by the rest of old Europe.
“We’re a very small country that’s in a difficult position,” he said. “We expect to join the European Union in 2007, so we are not trying to cause any separation of Europe. But you know, our small country has not had much luck aligning itself with the big powers. We were on the side of Germany in World Wars I and II. I hope that this time around it will be different. We are in need of foreign direct investments, but will not be unreasonable like Turkey.”
For now, it seems, our friends in Bulgaria are happy enough with just being friends—and that’s another thing I love about them. While other countries ask us for money, Bulgarians are far less demanding.
“We feel the support of the United States,” said Elitsa Panayotova, head of the commercial and economic office of the Bulgarian Embassy in Washington. “Why, just the other day, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans was in Bulgaria meeting with our president and prime minister. That sent a very strong message of support.”
Man, if Don Evans is a strong message of support, these guys will be friends for life.

Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv

New York Daily News: The Cuisine of the Balkans. April 21, 2003

The Cuisine of the Balkans

By Donna Daniels Gelb

What's cooking in Bulgaria? We don't hear much about the cuisine of the Balkans, but some recent travel articles and online missives from a highly regarded producer of Bulgarian cheeses prompted me to have a look at the Web site www.TangraGroup.com. Drawn in by the exotic music emanating from my computer, I found myself perusing a list of very tasty-sounding recipes from this often overlooked country north of Greece. Roasted Sheep Cheese, consisting of nothing more than good Bulgarian feta, extra-virgin olive oil, oregano and black pepper baked in a dish and served with crackers seemed a perfect answer to the "something new to serve with drinks" question.

Interested in more than cheese now, I went to www.PassionateAboutFood.net, where recipes are international but site-owner and Web designer Rossi has a large collection of dishes from Bulgaria, his country of origin. Pork Chops Sliven Style, baked with white wine, garlic, mushrooms and tomatoes, could quickly perk up a weeknight dinner, and Mish-Mash — a type of omelette with tomatoes, red peppers, onion, cheese and parsley — sounded like a good reason to have people over for a weekend brunch. Finally, I wandered over to the Bulgarian National Cuisine section of www.omda.bg/engl/cook/entry.htm, where there were no less than five versions of Kavarma Kebap, the national dish of spiced chopped meat, leeks or onions and red pepper grilled on skewers until juicy or served as meatballs in their own sauce. (The Bulgarian dishes shown here are from the restaurant Mehanata in Manhattan.)

Now for a bottle of good Bulgarian wine.

E-mail: DigitalDigestDDG@aol.com

Reuters: Want to live 100 years? Eat Bulgarian yoghurt.

By Anna Mudeva

MOMCHILOVTSI, Bulgaria, April 28 (Reuters) - Lactobacillus bulgaricus sounds like a nasty infectious disease but the organism that curdles milk may be the reason Maria Shopova recently celebrated her 100th birthday.

Unaware that she may owe her longevity to the friendly bacterium, Maria grins, unveiling her two remaining teeth, and explains: "It's luck given by God".

The lively centenarian, who kept a cow until she was 80, has lived on dairy products - yoghurt in particular - most of her life in the picturesque mountain village of Momchilovtsi in southern Bulgaria.

The Balkan country proudly claims to have invented yoghurt and given the world the secret to a long life but its own consumption has steadily declined since the collapse of communism.

Yoghurt is slowly disappearing from the nation's table with annual consumption falling from 40 kg (88 lb) per capita, the world's highest in the 1980s, to 22 kg in 2001.

The drop has paralleled a decline in agricultural production and incomes over the past 13 years as ex-communist Bulgaria charts a difficult path towards a market economy, industry officials said.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the number of centenarians has also fallen to
187 in 2001 out of Bulgaria's population of eight million, or less than a one in every thousand, statistics show. Around 100 years earlier, the figure was four in every thousand.

YOGHURT LINKED TO LONGEVITY

Now found at supermarkets around the world, it wasn't until the early 1900s that Russian scientist Ilya Mechnikov, a 1908 Nobel Prize winner, linked yoghurt with longevity.

Mechnikov, who worked at the Paris-based Pasteur Institute, compiled statistics from 36 countries to discover more people lived to the age of 100 in Bulgaria than in any other. He attributed this to the country's most traditional food - home-made yoghurt.

Later, numerous scientific studies in Europe, Japan and the United States proved the bacteria in yoghurt help maintain good health by protecting the human body from toxins, infections, allergies and some types of cancer.

Historians think yoghurt was part of the diet of Bulgaria's most ancient inhabitants, the Thracians, who were good sheep breeders.
They say that in Thracian yog meant "thick" and urt meant "milk" and that's how the word yoghurt appeared.

Between the fourth and sixth century BC, they used to put milk in lambskin bags, which they carried about on their waists. The warmth of the body and
the bags' microflora fermented it. |
Some scientists think that yoghurt's predecessor was a fermented milk drink called "kumis". It was made from mare's milk by the proto-Bulgarians, a nomadic tribe who moved from Asia to the Balkans in AD 681.

Legend says that the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan used yoghurt to feed his army because of its healthy properties.

In Western Europe, it made its debut in the 16th century in the court of the French king Francis I, when a Turkish doctor cured the king's persistent stomach trouble by putting him on a Bulgarian yoghurt diet, writes professor Hristo Chomakov in his book "Bulgarian yoghurt - health and longevity".

"The traditional Bulgarian yoghurt is a unique product because of our country's unique microclimate," said Tsona Stefanova, head of the research centre at LB Bulgaricum, a state-run company licensed to export yoghurt know-how.

"It has its own specific taste and properties. It is sour and thick so that when you turn the pot over, yoghurt sticks and does not fall," she added.

ONLY IN BULGARIA
"Bulgaricus can grow only in Bulgaria, elsewhere it mutates," said Georgi Georgiev, manager of Lactina Ltd. which deals with research and production of health food.

Georgiev said his team had found strains of bulgaricus in soil, on some trees' bark, in blossoms and even in ant-hills in Bulgaria's most environmentally clean regions such as Momchilovtsi in the southern Rhodopa mountains.

Experiments showed that a wooden stick left over an ant-hill for a while and then dipped into boiled and cooled milk would ferment it and turn it into yoghurt, as would antique silver coins, said Georgiev's assistant Nikolai Zhilkov.

A good source of vitamin B, calcium and protein, yoghurt's virtue as a health food has defied time.

Apart from having a reputation for being kind to the digestive system, it is also an excellent face cleansing mask, a soother for sunburn and douche for a thrush attack.

"Numerous researchers have shown that fermented milk has strong anti-tumour effect, which is due to its lactic acid bacteria," said Professor Akiyoshi Hosono at Japan's Shinsho University, who studies fermented milk's anti-mutagen impacts.

International food giants such as France's Danone, Swiss Nestle and Japan's Meiji Milk Products have been using friendly bacteria to produce health food known as probiotics over the past few decades.

Although local consumption may have dropped, Bulgaria is not ready to give up on its claim as the inventor of yoghurt.

Economy Ministry officials told Reuters Sofia wanted the World Trade Organisation to prevent other countries from describing their yoghurt as "Bulgarian" or "Bulgarian-style".

"It is going to be the food of the new millennium. The world is gradually getting crazy about healthy food," said Georgiev.

April 28, 2003

Dairy produce is friend, not foe for teenage girls

27/08/03 - Adolescent girls who consume a moderate amount of dairy products are not likely to have a higher body mass index or experience an increase in percentage of body fat, concludes a new study.

The study, published in the September 2003 issue of the International Journal of Obesity, followed the girls from pre-adolescence through adolescence, and claims to be the first in children to analyse the relationship between dairy food consumption and body weight status over time.

"Teenage girls can maintain a healthy weight and include dairy products," said Aviva Must, associate professor of community health at Tufts University and one of the study's authors. "Dispelling that myth is important because the potential health benefits of the natural calcium in dairy products, particularly its role in building bone mass, are so significant in adolescent girls. The window for maximising bone mass occurs only in adolescence and doesn't occur again."

Dairy foods are the primary source of calcium for children and adolescents. In the US the daily recommended intake for calcium in girls aged 12-18 years is 1,300 mg - the equivalent of four servings of milk, cheese or yogurt daily.

Research has shown that getting the calcium required to build bone mass in adolescence may help prevent osteoporosis. However, it is thought that nearly nine out of 10 teenage girls do not get the calcium they need, and this deficiency is largely driven by low dairy intake.

"Many young women cut out dairy for fear of fat. This study shows that they can keep milk, cheese and yogurt in their diets and maintain a healthy weight," said Deanna Rose, registered dietitian, National Dairy Council. "Dairy foods are the best natural sources of calcium and provide a unique nutrient combination of nine essential nutrients. Parents and health professionals should encourage teens to enjoy 3-4 servings of dairy a day, which is as easy as having a slice of cheese, a glass of chocolate milk and a container of yogurt."

Decreased calcium intake in children has also been attributed to decreased milk consumption resulting from increased consumption of sweetened drinks and the shift to eating meals outside the home. US researchers recently highlighted a worrying increase in the cases of rickets in children in North America thought to be due to this move away from the consumption of dairy products and most importantly milk, which is an excellent source of vitamins D and C.

Source: International Journal of Obesity (2003) 27, 1106-1113