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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Filed under Cheese Recipes
For anyone squeamish of cheese (who, let’s face it, probably ran screaming from this blog a long time ago) today’s cheese may well sound like their worst nightmare. Not only is it soft and squidgy like a ripe Brie but it also has blue veins and a slightly crusty rind. Only washed rinds terrify cheese-haters more than a squidgy, crusty blue. But one person’s cheese nightmare is another’s jackpot and the combination sounded pretty fantastic to me. So when I caught sight of some at a food show recently, it was in my bag as quick as you like.
Here it is, oozing menacingly:
Filed under cheese
I just love the name of this cheese. I wasn’t sure how to say it when I bought it and the nice young chap who was selling it couldn’t enlighten me but I liked to think of it as pronounced like ‘Baron BY GOD!’, preferably by Brian Blessed, whilst dressed as Henry VIII. I was terrified that in the course of researching the cheese I would find out that it was actually pronounced ‘Bee-Go’ or somesuch but fortunately ‘BY GOD!’ it is. Genius.
So, here is Baron Bigod, throwing its voice from the diaphragm, darling, and shaking its magisterial beard:
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I was recently in France for a couple of weeks and it’s fair to say I ate a lot of cheese. A mammoth amount of cheese. An obscene amount of cheese. I took some photos of the cheese and was going to post them all on here but then realised that I would be in danger of looking like the weirdy neighbour in the 1970s that used to invite everyone over to show them their holiday slides over a coq au vin and a Wall’s Vienetta: ‘Here’s me paddling in the river eating some French bread and camembert…and here’s me in the scenic town of Perigueux with a brebis au fenugrec…just me lounging by the pool with a sliver of Roquefort…’ You get the picture. Hello, are you still there?
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Filed under fromage friday
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:
Filed under home cheese-making
Soft goat’s cheese was the choice for July’s Cheese, Please Recipe Challenge; a lovely, summery cheese light enough to grace a salad if the sun deigns to comes out or equally hold its own as part of a comforting casserole whilst we watch the driving rain pelt down. The chèvre gauntlet was laid down but who would come to the party…?
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Filed under cheese please challenge, Uncategorized
I was leafing through the British section of the cheese-porn that is Juliet Harbutt’s World Cheese Book, when I came across an intriguing-sounding little cheese; named simply ‘Grace’, it was apparently a fresh soft cheese, packed into jars and covered with sunflower oil and herbs and spices. It sounded lovely but I sadly can’t find any trace of the cheese now, nor its producers.
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I love my local shop but do think they should change their strapline to ‘Let Us Surprise You!’ The surprise being that they have run out of semi-skimmed milk but do have preserved lemons or have no fish whatsoever but shelves full of venison sausages. And so it was that earlier in the week I went in to buy some spring onions and left with a packet of samphire. (And no, I don’t live in some very chi-chi area of London where we all breakfast on crayfish and acai berries, just in case that’s what you’re thinking; I just have a weird, if rather lovely, local shop.)
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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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In a recent blog post about the Perfect Summer Cheeseboard, the cheesemongers I asked were universal in their love of goat’s cheese in the summer. Variously described as ‘fresh’, ‘citrusy’ and ‘luxurious’, it’s a great summer choice. Think herby tarts and fresh salads, grilled sandwiches and warm frittatas.
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Filed under cheese please challenge
Fromage Homage 