I chose this cheese as in the space of a week two fellow cheese-fans raved about it and posted photos. I’d tried original Yarg cheese before but not this variation. I bought it from a local market next to a river; as South London goes, it’s about as rural as it gets and the kind of leafy damp place I imagine wild garlic might have grown in the past, before the rusty shopping trolleys squashed it all.
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Tag Archives: pasteurised
Wild Garlic Yarg
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Fowlers Sage Derby
There’s something of the déjà vu about Sage Derby. I feel nostalgic for it, it reminds me of my childhood but I haven’t the foggiest idea why. I never remember eating it or seeing it in the house. I grew up in the next door county so perhaps it was always on the supermarket shelves (I was going to say pub menus but in those days it was all chicken-in-a-basket and a piece of Stilton on the cheeseboard would have been the talk of the town.) So, I don’t know why I think I know Sage Derby. Mum, if you’re reading this (and sometimes I fear it’s only my Mum reading), let me know if we ever ate Sage Derby.
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Mouth Almighty Lancashire Cheese
I’m a bit cynical about celebrities and ‘their’ products. I find it hard to believe that Britney Spears is really out the back chopping up lychees, quinces and civet cat testicles to make her perfume or that Frank Lampard is holed up in his garret, writing children’s stories (or writing joined-up letters, quite frankly). So when I heard that Sean Wilson – or ‘Martin Platt off Coronation Street’ as he’s been called for the last thirty years or so – was making cheese now, I’ll confess, I thought ‘Yeah, of course he is…’
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Oxford Isis
After surviving a brush with Stinking Bishop last month, I got cocky and decided to plump for another washed rind cheese. Traditionally renowned as ‘the really stinky ones’, these are the cheeses that get banned from public transport or the ones you should sew into the cushions if your spouse has an affair. This time round it was Oxford Isis and I have to say, things were not looking good when I got into the car and my other half said, ‘Oh no, I think the baby’s just done something’, a refrain that was to be repeated every time I opened the fridge door over the next two days.
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Blacksticks Blue
I was drawn to this cheese by the story of its name. A blue cheese (rather obviously), it was named ‘Blacksticks’ after a farm of the same name near to the dairy, where some tall chestnut trees looked like black sticks against the winter sky. I love the British countryside in the autumn and winter (my other half likes to go on about ‘crows in ploughed fields’ as he knows it will make me all misty-eyed) and, as the summer starts to wind down, it seemed an appropriate cheese to check out.
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Mex in the City: Gringa Dairy
Since starting this blog, I’ve been looking forward to meeting my first proper cheese-maker. Whenever I imagined it, I was usually welly-clad in a field, perhaps with the early morning mist floating over the grass as some cows lumbered into the dairy. It’s fair to say that my fromager fantasies didn’t look much like this:
Looking more Albert Square than Ambridge, Gringa Dairy is situated under a railway arch in Peckham, South London. Peckham has a reputation for being bad-ass rather than bucolic but, beyond the ‘don’t go there or you’ll get stabbed’ tabloid headlines, it boasts an eclectic food scene that encompasses events like KERB, restaurants like Peckham Refreshment Rooms and producers such as new craft brewers Brick. Another new kid on the block, Gringa Dairy was founded by American Kristen Schnepp and makes artisan Mexican cheese.
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Stinking Bishop
I’d heard so much talk about Stinking Bishop that I was starting to think it was some sort of novelty cheese. Dubbed ‘the stinkiest cheese in Britain’ in 2009, it seems to be the marmite of cheese-lovers – you either love it or hate it. My sister’s boyfriend adores it but the Other Half thinks it’s the devil’s work. Its appearance in a Wallace and Gromit film where it raised Wallace from the dead further cemented its reputation as a hardcore cheese.
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Home-made Feta Cheese (or Fetter Cheese, as it shall be legally known)
So, this Feta sort of started off as halloumi. I found a recipe for halloumi and bought myself a few pints of unpasteurised milk. I was looking forward to some nice squeaky halloumi.
However, as anyone who has followed my previous cheese-making adventures will know, I’m actually not very good at making cheese. I think I’m generally good at concentrating and fine details but the process of cheese-making takes things to a whole new level and seems to turn me into the world’s clumsiest fool. And so it was that, within the first few minutes, I dropped my thermometer and it looked like this:
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Isle Of Man Creamery Druidale Cheese with Mango and Pineapple
Whenever my friend Rachel goes back to her native Isle of Man, she puts up with a variety of hilarious gags about tax avoidance and Jeremy Clarkson’s holiday home. Maybe some light-hearted ribbing about sheep and/or incest. You know, all the usual xenophobic island stereotypes. But when she recently brought me back some Manx cheese, I started to wonder if the joke was on me. You see, it had [gasp] ‘fruity bits’ in it, mango and pineapple to be precise. If I’m honest, my first thought was, ‘Ugh! Cheese aberration.’
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Perl Wen
I’m a recent convert to Caerphilly (or Caerfilli as I now realise it should be called) and a long-time snaffler of Brie and so when I saw Pong describe a cheese as the ‘organic lovechild of a Caerphilly and a Brie’ I knew I had to hunt it down and make it mine. That cheese is Perl Wen and here it is, looking all creamy and lovely and a bit gooey around the edges:
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Fromage Homage 