Crikey. January was certainly a month filled with warm, cheesy comfort. So much for the new year as a time of salad and juicing; I was inundated with people sharing their cheesy recipes. Thirty-four to be precise! I hope I haven’t missed anyone and apologies if I’ve misrepresented your recipe or made your photo look wonky in any way – this month’s round-up was a Herculean task. So without further ado – get yourself a comfy chair and a glass of something, you’ll be here for a while – here’s the round-up (and exciting news about February’s Challenge)…
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January’s Cheese, Please! Challenge Round-up – Comfort Food and Winter Warmers
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Lacto-Fermented Vegetables with Dill
It’s fair to say that on hearing about Miss Muffett’s troubles, most people don’t give much thought to the whey that’s mentioned. (Or indeed the curds; I think most of us are thinking about the prospect of a great hairy arachnid landing on us.) But when you realise that to produce one kilo of cheese it takes about ten litres of milk and you’re therefore left with nine litres of whey, you can start to ponder about what happens to it all.
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Caboc
Given that tomorrow is Burns Night, I thought I would take the opportunity to correct the terrible fact that I haven’t yet featured a Scottish cheese (I know, I know, the shame etc.) So, without further ado, I offer up a suitably cheesy excerpt from The Holy Fair by one of the first cheesemongers of Scotland (oh yes, read on fact fans), Mr Robbie Burns:
Here farmers gash, in ridin graith,
Gaed hoddin by their cotters;
There swankies young, in braw braid-claith,
Are springing owre the gutters.
The lasses, skelpin barefit, thrang,
In silks an’ scarlets glitter;
Wi’ sweet-milk cheese, in mony a whang,
An’ farls, bak’d wi’ butter,
Fu’ crump that day.
Burns was no stranger to cheese, as his mother was a peasant cheese-maker; as a boy he often helped out, selling the cheese locally (which makes him a cheesemonger in my book). And so, without further ado, raise your whisky glasses, butter your neeps and say hello to Scotland’s oldest cheese, Caboc:
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Home-Made Paneer Cheese in a Balti
Despite the lump of impenetrable mousetrap that was my home-made Cheddar, Colin, I was keen to get back on the cheese-making horse but felt that I need to do some limbering up before I tackled anything too complicated. Paneer is about as simple as cheese gets; milk is curdled and then pressed into a lump. It’s difficult to get wrong and suitable even for an inveterate cheese-mangler like me.
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Barkham Blue
Today’s cheese choice demonstrates the power of social media. Or something like that. When I wrote up my sorry tale of the mauling judging of my home-made Cheddar, Colin, I was somewhat mortified to receive several tweets from proper cheese-makers, although all of them were kind and full of encouragement. One of them was from a producer called Two Hoots Cheese, with reference to my nascent plans to produce a Stilton called Trevor:
It made me smile and so I clicked on their profile and then onto their website and read all about the cheeses they produce, which included one called Barkham Blue, which I’d heard of before but never tried. A few days later I was in my local cheese shop to stock up when what should I see on their shelves but Barkham Blue! After a wee tasting, which involved the cheese-monger being rather lovely and ceremoniously involving my five year old (who loves blue cheese and, after much slightly precocious Gallic shrugging and face-manoeuvring, gave it a literal thumbs up) the Barkham Blue was in the bag. And here it is:
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Not Very French Onion Soup with Lincolnshire Poacher Toasts
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If life gives you onions, make…er…bhajis? But bhajis aren’t renowned for their cheesiness (although I’m sure you could probably whack a bit of paneer in there with great results) and so, when I mucked up on a grocery order and found myself with the Mount Kilimanjaro of onions, French Onion Soup it was. Typically French Onion Soup is topped with melted gruyère and so I mused upon British cheese and thought of Lincolnshire Poacher. Poacher is made to a recipe loosely based on West Country cheddar but is also influenced by Swiss mountain cheeses due to the starter culture that’s used. The result is a smooth Gruyère-like texture but with the nutty, grassy taste of a mature Cheddar. Perfect melty cheese.
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Ogleshield
People don’t tend to talk about cheese coincidences, do they? Perhaps most people don’t have cheese coincidences. I’m not sure I used to, to be honest, but if you’re going to eat a lot of cheese and read about a lot of cheese, it’s going to happen. And so it was when some friends came round for a fondue night and brought with them the gift of a chunk of cheese. (Kind guests! Wise guests!) The cheese was called Ogleshield and it just so happened that one of the cheeses that was lying in an enormous grated cheese-mountain behind me, ready to be fondued, was Bermondsey Hardpressed. And goodness me, what do you know, they only go and share a Cheese-Daddy! (That’s very different from a Sugar Daddy by the way…)
Here is the Ogleshield (it was vacuum-packed so I don’t think it usually looks quite this shiny):
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British Cheese Fondue Night
I’d made fondue before but this was back in the days when I was under the illusion that all British cheese was good for was toast topping and jacket potatoes, so I’d used traditional Swiss cheeses such as Emmental and Gruyère. Having garnered a reputation as the local ‘mad cheese woman’, I’d been promising some neighbours a fondue knees-up for a while. Once the date was sealed, I decided to try and create a menu from British cheeses, now that I know what a great variety of styles there are available. So, I set off for Borough Market on a cheese-quest (ensuring that I had only a limited amount of cash and no card in my wallet so I didn’t get the Borough Market red mist and end up spending £120 on partridges, quinces and kangaroo salami).
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Tooting Gold: Judgement Day
Anyone who’s been getting their cheesy fix from this blog for a while now will know that in the bowels of my house, amongst the old abs toners and rusting tins of paint, lives a home-made cheddar which goes by the name of Tooting Gold (or more affectionately E-Colin, or Colin for short). Colin was made in June 2013. I’d been learning about cheese for about six weeks when I thought it would be interesting to see for myself how it’s made and so, with zero knowledge about milk, cultures, rennet, temperatures, acidity, timings, hygiene, maturation or indeed pretty much any aspect of cheese-making, I plunged right in there and tried to make a cheddar. Not an easy ricotta or even a little chèvre. Oh no. A cheddar, which requires rennet and cultures and cheddaring and moulding and maturing and all manner of what-not.
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January’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Blog Challenge – Comfort Food and Winter Warmers
A Happy New Year to everyone! And I hope that you haven’t gorged yourself on Christmas cheese such that you can’t bear the sight of it…because it’s Cheese, Please! time again. January is a miserable month. Cold and dark and with no prospect of any festivities to bring light and feasting, it’s a hunker-down-and-wait-it-out sort of month (unless you’re like my neighbour who jets off to Nigeria for three months in which case it’s probably quite toasty).
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Fromage Homage 