Yes, I’ve eaten Red Leicester before. If truth be told, I was practically weaned on Red Leicester. I ate so much that it probably permanently altered my DNA. We always had a slab of it in the fridge – cheese sandwiches, cheesy jacket potatoes, cheese salads. But when I grew up, I went off Red Leicester. It always seemed to look a bit sweaty and shiny and taste quite sharp and, if I’m honest, there’s probably an element of food snobbery about its colour. We’ve been so conditioned to think that all colouring in foods is bad – salmon shouldn’t be pink, smoked haddock shouldn’t be yellow and children’s juice shouldn’t be the colour of dayglo socks from the 1980s – that orange cheese somehow feels a bit wrong. But back to the colouring later…
Tag Archives: unpasteurised
Innes Log
I was pleased as punch recently when ‘the real me’ won a selection of British cheeses from La Cremerie in a recipe competition with my Spenwood Soufflé with Blackberry Sauce. When they arrived (and I could smell them even before I opened the box – bliss!) I was even more pleased that one of them was from Staffordshire, county of my birth. I’d been searching for homeland cheeses for some time but with little luck. I had a brief flutter of excitement when I found a cheesemaker based around the corner from where I used to live but hope was dashed when I discovered that they’d ceased production. Then when I tried making Staffordshire Oatcakes for the first time, I wanted to use local cheddar but I may as well have been trying to get my hands on Novak Djokovic’s donkey cheese. I surrended my quest.
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Millstone
I choose a cheese to write about in a myriad of different ways. Some I hunt out because I’ve heard great things about them or because they have an intriguing history. Some are given to me by travelling friends. Some I panic buy at the last minute because I’ve just remembered. But this week’s cheese is the first that I’ve bought because I was amused by the fact that it looks like its name.
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Montgomery’s Cheddar and Salmon Fishcakes
Given that this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge is the very British Cheddar, it seems only right that I should conduct extensive research by stuffing my face with as many quality farmhouse Cheddars as I can lay my hands on. The first up for tasting is Montgomery’s Cheddar:
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Rocamadour
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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Alham Wood Junas
Mention British farm animals to most people and they’ll conjure up an image of green fields trimmed with hedgerows, black and white cows grazing the grass and chewing the cud. Or maybe fluffy sheep cropping the sparse vegetation on a mountainside. At a push, perhaps some cheeky goats in their perennial eating-the-washing-line stance. What they probably won’t come up with is a herd of black water buffalo, great horns curling over their horizontal ears. But that’s exactly where this week’s cheese comes from. And the buffalo aren’t paddling in the floodplains of Pakistan or India; they’re grazing the pastures of Somerset.
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Ribblesdale Goat’s Cheese (Smoked)
Mention Hawes in Yorkshire to many cheese-lovers and they’ll think of the Wensleydale Creamery, a big old operation with viewing gallery, museum and gift shop to boot. But recently Ribblesdale Cheese caught my eye – mainly because all of the roads where I live are named after places in Lancashire, with Ribblesdale being one of them; the Ribble valley straddles both Yorkshire and Lancashire, a pretty perilous position for anywhere to take, quite frankly. (It’s fair to say the region has ‘history’.) Also based in Hawes, Ribblesdale Cheese is a slightly smaller operation, with just three staff but one sight of their snowy white goat’s cheese, set off with its brown rind, the colour of a smoky ceiling in an age-old pub and, as ever, size didn’t matter.
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Summertime…and the City is cheesy…
Back in May, when I sat huddled in my thermal slanket, the hail battering against the windows, booking a place on a Cheese Walk in the City of London seemed like a good idea. Hopefully it would be a typical English day in July: overcast, fairly chilly and with a middling to high chance of a freezing downpour. So I admit that when the day dawned with the kind of heat that melts pigeon’s feet into the tarmac, it suddenly seemed less appealing. And throw in a tube journey and consuming large quantities of cheese and wine in the sun and the prospect started to feel more like appalling. But I take my role as intrepid cheese correspondent seriously (coupled with the fact I’d already shelled out for it upfront) and so I donned the Factor 30 and set forth valiantly.
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Mimolette
I’ve been eating a lot of British cheese recently as there’s so much to discover on my own doorstep and so many great stories behind our cheeses that I hadn’t felt the urge to stray very far afield. But there’s one cheese I keep hearing about that’s causing such a ruckus at the moment that I felt compelled to check it out. And that cheese is mimolette.
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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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Fromage Homage 