Perhaps it’s just me but when I think of historical British cheeses, it’s the hard ones that spring to mind: Cheddar, Cheshire, the crumblies – Caerphilly and Wensleydale. And I confess that when I first saw a piece of Bath Soft Cheese, I thought, ‘Oh hello, here’s one we pilfered from the French.’ But actually I couldn’t have been more wrong, as whilst Bath Soft Cheese certainly looks a bit on the Gallic side, it turns out to have a British pedigree stretching back centuries.
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Tag Archives: cow’s milk cheese
Bath Soft Cheese
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Tooting Gold II: Further Adventures in Home Cheese-Making
Last month I documented my first attempt to make an artisan Cheddar cheese for the discerning citizens of SW17. If you’ve already read it, you’ll know that it wasn’t an unqualified success. If you haven’t, the sorry story is here. Or to summarise: I bought the wrong milk, didn’t have a thermometer or proper mould, heated up the curds too quickly, drank some wine and left them to drain for too long before finally someone moved my ‘cheese’ onto a warm hob and it gave up the ghost altogether. The finished ‘Cheddar’ looked like this:
So. Not terribly Cheddary then.
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Colston Bassett Stilton, Pear, Walnut and Dandelion Salad
The Other Half’s step-dad has a wonderful knack for giving random gifts. This week turned out to be no exception and we were presented with a Spitfire jigsaw puzzle, a bag of paraphernalia warning against the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning and half a kilo of walnuts. I’ll spare you the first two but look at these lovelies:
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Gorwydd Caerphilly
I thought I must have tasted Caerphilly. I mean, how could I not have? It’s up there with Cheddar and Cheshire and Stilton as a traditional British cheese. It even has its own joke (don’t tell me you don’t know it). But what I vaguely recollected was a dull crumbly white cheese so when I happened to mosey past Gorwydd’s stand at Borough Market and saw their great rindy wheels of squidgy ivory loveliness, I was perplexed. In the name of research I thought I’d better try some. Then in the name of greediness I thought I’d better buy a chunk and take it away with me.
Here it is, happy in its new home, showing off a bit with its frilly rind:
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Tooting Gold: When Home Cheese-Making Goes Bad
My area of London is quite trendy these days, with artisan producers popping up all over the place. We’ve got micro-breweries, had a flirtation with a wine collective and I can get honey from a lady round the corner. But cheese? Aha – no! There seemed a clear gap in the market for some urban cheese round here. And so my quest to produce a nice tasty cheddar began. I’d even thought of a name – Tooting Gold. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
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Cheshire Cheese Enchiladas in Mole Poblano Sauce
Mexico was the first holiday that the Other Half and I went on together. He remembers it mainly as two weeks of ensuring ready access to a lavatory but my stomach is made of famously strong stuff and so I have happy memories of fresh guacamole and salsa, bursting with chillies and lime, fish grilled on the beach, scrambled eggs with chilli and the famous mole poblano sauce. Often abbreviated to ‘the one with chilli and chocolate’, there’s so much more to this smoky, rich sauce (which is hardly surprising when you look at the long list of ingredients). Traditionally served over meat, especially turkey, in this recipe it pairs well with the salty, nutty Cheshire cheese.
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Reypenaer V.S.O.P.
Okay, okay, I’ll come clean from the start. This cheese is Gouda and I have eaten Gouda before. But although it said Gouda on the label, this one looked different, casually propped up against the back of the chiller cabinet with its ‘two year aged’ label. I’ll admit it; it looked expensive and a bit vintage. It was the cheese equivalent of being beckoned onto a yacht by a leathery-skinned old oligarch jangling his Rolex at me. Reader, I fell for it.
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Paneer Nilgiri Korma
Much of this blog so far seems to have seen me wistfully wandering country lanes in a fog of elderflowers and bluebells. But the truth of it is that I live in the city, where urbanity meets suburbia. It’s not very pretty and sometimes it’s a bit noisy and scary. But in just a ten minute walk, the culinary world is at my fingertips. From kaffir lime leaves to mango powder, salt-fish to kecap manis, I can buy pretty much any ingredient from around the world. And above all, I can eat curry. In the space of a mile I can eat Sri Lankan curry, Pakistani curry, Indian curry, Caribbean curry, Nepalese curry, Bangladeshi curry. It’s fair to say if I’m not cooking with cheese, I’m cooking a curry. But this is a blog about cheese. Cheese and curry?
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Smoked Lincolnshire Poacher
There has been a distinct bias so far on this blog towards cheeses of the English southern counties and semi-soft cheeses and I felt this week I should attempt to redress the balance. So I’ve headed north-east to munch on Lincolnshire Poacher, a hard unpasteurised cheese made from the milk of cows that graze on the chalky pastures of the Lincolnshire Wolds, an area not usually associated with dairy let alone cheese-making.
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Olde Sussex Cheese and Beer Bread
We were down in East Sussex for the Bank Holiday weekend and, once the rain had stopped and we’d swilled out our tent, the weather was glorious and the countryside lush. If I was a cow in Sussex I’d be pretty happy with my lot. Endless green meadows full of buttercups and clover would fill the belly of the fussiest Friesian. So it seemed only right to hunt out some local cheese. And as we drove though ancient country lanes, their banks spilling wildflowers onto the road, it seemed that there was an oast house round every corner.
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Fromage Homage 