With some cheeses, their reputation precedes them. These are the cheeses that crop up at tastings, the cheeses that hard-core cheese addicts tell you that you have to try, the cheeses that sound a bit maverick and even, dare I say it, sometimes a bit alarming. And so it was with this week’s cheese. Every time I put out a plaintive call for inspiration on Twitter, someone would come back, telling me to try St James. So I tried to but then discovered that it’s a seasonal cheese and it wasn’t available. Then I tried again but realised I needed to make a trip to central London to track it down. It was becoming the stuff of legend. Finally I found it in Neal’s Yard Dairy and captured it, to see if it lived up to the hype:
Tag Archives: cheese
Cheese Toastie Renaissance
You don’t hear about cheese toasties much these days, do you? They’ve all been rebranded as paninis and grilled cheese sandwiches. So recently, when I was invited to take part in a cheese toastie-making competition by the Barber’s Cheddar maestros, it triggered all manner of culinary flashbacks. I used to love a toastie growing up and my older sister and I concocted some interesting variations on the cheese classic, most notably banana toasties (very sweet, certainly likely to burn your upper lip) and baked beans (does very pleasant and interesting things to the bread inside, trust me on this one).
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Mayfield
Okay, I’ll ‘fess up. I chose this week’s cheese for no other reason than it has holes in it, which is always a very funny thing, even in the serious world of artisan cheese. Holey cheese is the sort of cheese that you get in cartoons; it’s Tom and Jerry cheese, cheese for mice to drag into a half-moon mouse-hole in the skirting board. As a child I remember being fascinated by the holes and how they got there. I had some wide-ranging theories ranging from mice nibbling them to someone making them with some sort of special cheese-hole tool. But, really, how did the holes get in there?
Here it is, Mayfield, the holiest of British cheese:
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Cheddar Cheese Pasties with Sorrel and Elephant Garlic
Down in the West Country recently, I found myself with a large amount of Barber’s Cheddar cheese (there’s a story behind this but that’s for another time). I’ve written about their cheese before here: not only do they make a really good block Cheddar, they are also the oldest Cheddar-maker in the world and the guardians of Britain’s traditional starter cultures, which is a pretty big deal for many of our farmhouse cheese-makers.
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June’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Blog Challenge – Herbs
There are bus stops that are bigger than my back garden but we make the best of it and at this time of year both flowers and vegetables are starting to have a stretch and a yawn in preparation for the big summer show-off. The herbs, however, are already lush and fragrant and so served as the perfect inspiration for this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge.
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May’s Cheese, Please! Challenge Round-Up – Seasonal and Cheeseonal
Seasonal food was in abundance this month as bloggers paired cheese with everything from asparagus from England to corn in the USA. Sweet, savoury, spicy and smoky all made an appearance in the recipes, as did cheeses from paneer to Cheddar, blue cheese and cream cheese. So, without further ado, here are May’s seasonal, cheeseonal recipes:
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Cheese-Rolling on Cooper’s Hill
I grew up in the sort of place where young men were not afraid to Morris Dance. Similarly somewhere, in the forgotten bowels of local press archives, there may be a photograph of me dressed as a Victorian wench, holding a scabby old stuffed monkey. If there was a local tradition that involved dressed up strangely and behaving oddly, we were all out on the streets like moths to the proverbial flame. So I was almost tempted by the annual cheese-rolling extravaganza at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire. Rolling down a grassy slope whilst probably under the influence of alcohol? Oh yeah, been there, done that.
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Alexandra
This week, I managed to finish all my work by Wednesday and so this obviously deserved some sort of reward. For me, there’s no greater treat than going to Borough Market and spending most of what I’ve just earned and so that’s where I headed, bribing the youngest child with artisan croissant to stay in his pushchair and not yell ‘POO!’ at passers-by. A trip to Neal’s Yard Dairy was always on the cards and I’d also stocked up on several of life’s other essentials (you know the sort of thing – clams, vino cotto, smoked paprika in a pretty tin) when I was starting to mosey towards the exit.
But – wait! What did I see before me? Hurray, it was only a cheesemaker whose wares I’d been wanting to try for ages. How exciting! Wildes Cheese are only based across the river from me in North London but I hadn’t yet managed to track down their cheese or pay them a visit (scary place, the North). So the sight of their stall pleased me immensely. As did this, Alexandra, the cheese that I decided to take home after gobbling all of the others too:
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Gorwydd Caerphilly and Herbs Pull-Apart Bread
I started this blog just over a year ago. It was meant to be about cheese generally, from all over the world. This wasn’t inspired by any sense of hands-across-the-nations internationalism but was simply because I didn’t realise there was any decent cheese in Britain. Seriously. It’s no exaggeration to say that, a year ago, I probably couldn’t have named ten British cheeses.
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Nettle Gnocchi with Cashel Blue Sauce
I seem to have gone a bit forage crazy, or as crazy as you can when you live in the proverbial concrete jungle. One plant that isn’t fussy about the air quality or proximity to rolling hills is nettles (although I read that if you live in the US, you have to buy them from special hippy stores – is that really right, Stateside folks?) I tried the blue cheese and nettle combination last year when I made Blue Cheese and Nettle Drop Scones and it was surprisingly good; the herbal, slightly fizzy taste of the nettles complementing the tang of the blue cheese.
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Fromage Homage 