Cheese No. 6

On Sunday afternoon, I visited the cutest, tiniest cheese store. When C. suggested that we check out this new cheese shop that had opened around the corner from her on Roncesvalles, I hadn't imagined it would be so small. In fact, I am writing this post from an office that feels bigger than the store! But crammed into Thin Blue Line's small space were a myriad of tasty treats -- fresh breads, olive oils, tapenades, crackers, salts -- and, of course, a small but well chosen selection of cheeses, many of which seemed to be Quebec-sourced. I was tempted to buy some Applewood Smoked Cheddar because that's on my list of recommended cheeses to try but I was on a mission for some Parmigiano Reggiano. Fortunately, TBL had a wheel in stock and was willing to accommodate my request for under 100g. I had come across a recipe for a chickpea salad on a foodblog I've started reading that called for it, and after reading this website, I was sold on only using the best of the best.

The cheese I purchased at TBL

The salad didn't blow my mind but it made for a pretty yummy lunch yesterday and I think I will try mixing the cheesy chickpeas with some spinach today to give it some crunch. However, as is the case with each cheese I try, in reading about the traditional cheese-making process for Parmigiano-Reggiano in Italy, I learned a couple of fascinating things:

1. Quality control involves a hammer

[T]he sound produced by the whole cheese when it is hammered by a special hammer is extremely important for an expert of Parmigiano-Reggiano. A trained ear is able to give a judgement about the inner structure of the whole cheese and its consistence: if the sound is hard the content of Parmigiano-Reggiano is homogeneous and compact, while if the sound is deep-toned and booming it's very likely that there are some swellings, bladders or empty zones; in this case the "whole cheese" is inevitably depreciated or it can also be rejected.

2. It aides the digestion of other foods

Parmigiano-Reggiano stimulates the gastric production thus helping to digest other foods, too. That’s why it is useful and correct eating flakes of Parmigiano-Reggiano as hors-d’oeuvre or at the end of the meal. 100 grams of Parmigiano-Reggiano are assimilated in 45 minutes (contrary to, for instance, 4 hours needed for the same quantity of meat)

3. It's another "place of origin" cheese

Parmigiano-Reggiano is strictly bound to its place of origin. Both the production of milk and its transformation into cheese take place in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna to the west of the Reno River and Mantua to the east of the Po River. The secret of such goodness originates in the place of origin, in the natural feed, and in the high quality milk with no additives.

Some Parmiagiano Reggiano statistics:

• 20-24 average ageing of the wheels (in months)
• 38 average weight of a wheel (in kg)
• 16 litres of milk to make 1kg
• 600 litres of milk to make one wheel
• 3,136,191 number of wheels produced in 2005

BONUS READING: An interview with Gurth Pretty, the author of a book on Canada's artisanal cheeses

Laughing Cow

When I was a kid, I used to love La Vache Qui Rit cheese (aka "Laughing Cow"). I suspect this was partly to do with the packaging: each piece of cheese was individually wrapped in foil, either as a 1cm cube or as a larger slice-of-pie wedge. The "party cubes" came in a rectangular tray, which inevitably once its plastic wrapper was removed would tumble out of the fridge when you were trying to get something else out and spill cheese cubes onto the floor -- at least three times before you'd eaten them all. The wedges were more practically packaged in a round cardboard box, containing two layers of cheese.

This iconic cheese was a fixture in my childhood fridge. I remember mostly eating it on its own but it was also pretty good to squish a wedge (or a couple cubes) between two Stoned Wheat Thins, preferably salted, with the salty side on the inside.

I haven't bought this cheese in years. Haven't thought of it since B. sent me a picture she took during the parade of sponsor floats that precedes the peloton during the Tour de France but I was (once again) researching cheese on Wikipedia and came across the entry for this product.

When I was younger, I don't think I realized that it was a processed cheese (just like the Kraft Singles I despised). According to Wikipedia, it's "a blend of cream, milk and fresh and aged cheeses, particularly emmenthaler, which are pasteurized to stop the ripening process." Nowadays, it doesn't just come in wedges and cubes: horrifingly, as promoted on the UK website, it comes in SQUEEZE BOTTLES! This marketing mistake (in my opinion) has not slowed sales: 10 million portions of The Laughing Cow® are consumed each day around the world - 7,500 every minute.

Unfortunately, for reasons not explained, "Currently, none of the products in The Laughing Cow® range can be guaranteed suitable for vegetarians." Too bad, I would have liked a bit(e) of nostalgia.

Cheese No. 5

Today's lunch: Goat feta, smoked tofu, Ryvita, Gala apple, bread

Without further delay, allow me to introduce the cheese I have been chipping away at for the last ten days:

Goat Feta (22% M.F.), Woolwich Dairy (Orangeville, ON), $need to check the fridge

Definitely one of the most flavourful cheeses I have tried this year, though I've been mostly eating it "straight" with crackers and bread since the vegetable ingredients needed for greek salad are terribly out of season. As far as fetas go, this one by Canada's leading goat's milk cheese producer (motto: "We've Got Your Goat") is not at all crumbly and has a real strong (tangy?) goat-y taste to it, not too salty either. Also, for strict vegetarians, you'll be happy to learn that it's rennet-free.

However, like Jarlsberg, the history of feta may be more interesting than its taste.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, I learned that feta is one of the oldest cheeses in the world and the traditional way to make this cheese is to use exclusively goat's milk or sheep's milk -- cow's milk feta is viewed as "non-authentic" by purists and Greeks (more on them below). The cheese is formed into blocks which are salted, and, traditionally, served sliced, which is where the cheese gets its name: "fetta" means "slice in Italian.

Of course, being a cheese with European origins, Feta has been embroiled in the whole "regional foodstuffs" debate. So in the same way that Champagne can only be use to describe sparkling wine from a particular region in France, Feta is a protected designation of origin cheese, meaning that, within the European Union, the name "feta" can only be used for the Greek stuff - not that similar stuff made by the Danes (aka, The Cheese Formerly Known as Feta Until We Lost a Lengthy Legal Battle). Apparently in Canada, we only respect PDO names when it comes to wine and spirits, which is why it's okay for the Woolwich Dairy to label their product as "feta."

When I started doing further research, I discovered there's a whole website devoted to the promotion of Greek feta, complete with A CHEESE VIDEOGAME called Feta Invaders. Very cool, even if it is just a marketing tool to get young people more interested in the cheese.

Bonus info: on the Woolwich Dairy website, I learned that the foods that pair nicely with goat cheese are: figs, pears, grapes, and apples, and Pinot Noir should be your wine choice.

PS - I'm actually not doing that bad if we're only 3 weeks into January and I'm already on my fifth cheese of the month.

Cheese Recommendations

"3 types of pecorino and honey" (courtesy Flickr)

Apologies to anyone who thought I would be trying a new type of cheese every day. At the moment, I'm having a hard time just remembering to buy cheese on a biweekly basis. After a year of not eating the stuff, you sort of fall out of the habit of including it on your grocery list and when I have tried to buy cheese recently, I am baffled by all the choices. However, I have been soliciting recommendations from friends and family. Here are some of the suggestions for what I should try, in the hope that by making them public I will eventually get around to trying them all...

• "I recommend tracking down some Saint-Andre, a super-intense brie, and Epoisses, a stinky cheese par excellence. And if you're back on the West coast, check out Saltspring Island Cheese Company's Blue Joliette, which—though it looks disgusting—is surprisingly palatable."
• "One of my favourite cheese treats is to get a few types of pecorino (Pienza, Tuscany makes the best), one old and hard, one medium, and one young and soft. then you get a couple of types of runny honey, slice the pecorino and drizzle honey over them. I like to mix and match the honey and cheese. YUM."
• Applewood Smoked Cheddar
• Gruyere
• "As for cheese: you could always try the stuff we called "pikkeltjes kaas" as kids (roughly translated: "cheese with spots"). It’s also referred to a Leydse kaas (sp?) and is, I think, basically a Gouda with caraway seeds or fennel or some such thing in it. Very yummy. Then there’s always the stalwart Gouda. I remember living with an aunt in Amsterdam and being sent to the "kaas boer" (cheese farmer) at the street market for "jonge belegen" -- a young Gouda. (I’m not too sure what the "belegen" referred to...) Then there’s the old, old cheese with the black wax around the wheel. That one is trés yummy, but also trés expensive (at least, here in Canada)..."
• "Lately... I've been buying goat brie, which has opened up all sorts of possibilities for me. I also bought some fig preserve, which goes really well with the brie - highly recommended!"

Please feel free to post your recommendations in the comments section...

Lesson No. 1: The Colour of Cheese

A comment by my brother wondering about what's in that smoky liquid that my Jarlsberg was dipped in to give it a brown coating got me thinking about how cheese is coloured.

As a kid, I remember being somewhat blown away to find out that Cheddar wasn't naturally orange. Wish I'd know about this website back then. I just accepted that it was dyed orange with chemicals but it turns out the reason for that colour isn't artificial, rather it's due to the addition of a pigment made from the "bright red outer covering of the seeds of a tropical plant." A few drops of vegetable dye made from Bixin (or, Annatto, after the Spanish word for the stuff) and your creamy-white cheese will gain "an appetizing yellow color," as one sales pitch for this cheese additive claims.

According to this website, you can add wine during the cheese-making process for flavour and/or colour. Cheese can also be soaked in red wine for a day or so, which will colour the exterior of the cheese (and, not surprisingly, infuse it with the flavour of the wine).

As for smoked cheeses, a brown exterior can be achieved the Jarlsberg way* (i.e. dip cheese in "smoky liquid") or the "old-fashioned" way, as employed by Teddington Cheese (and presumably other cheese makers). When smoking its cheddar, they first cut the cheese into wedges (because "the flavours can only penetrate a small way into the cheese") and then they place the wedges into "an oak fired smoke house for 6 hours," a process that not only infuses it with smokiness but turns the outside of the cheese "a fabulous chesnut brown colour."

* I tried to find out what's in the smoky liquid but no luck - anyone know?

Cheese No. 4

"Jarlsberg Smoke" (aka Smoked Jarlsberg), $11.79/lb - maker and provenance unknown

So I am not proving to be much of a cheese snob. Turns out the "mystery cheese" I picked out of the dollar bin a couple days ago is "one of Norway's greatest export successes in the world market" and "America's number 1 brand of Speciality cheese." It's not cheddar but in terms of exoticness, Jarlsberg seems to be a close cousin of Havarti and Feta. Oh well, I'd never tried it before and that's one of my big goals for this project: to taste different kinds and types of cheese.

But enough preamble, you're probably curious what I thought it tasted like. Well, being a smoked variety, it tasted, uh, smoky. Kind of like bacon, actually (though since I'm a vegetarian, I haven't eaten bacon in years...). It reminded me a bit of Gouda or Swiss (not surprisingly considering the cheese's history - more on that below). It wasn't overly creamy and the texture was a little bit rubbery. Also, what I thought was rind (and cut off last night when I sneaked some into my dinner) was actually just a layer of brown. I did some poking around on Jarlsberg.com and it turns out that the cheese "Acquires its characteristic taste by being dipped in a special smoky liquid. It gives the cheese a brown-coloured surface and a piquant, smoky taste." Okay, that's kind of gross. I'm curious if that's how other smoked varieties are made or if it's just a mass-production cheese-making technique.

The same website had lots of interesting info on the history of Jarlsberg. Here's an excerpt:

In 1830, the Swiss came to Norway’s Jarlsberg and Laurvig County (known as Vestfold County today) to teach the Norwegians to make cheese. These foreign master cheese makers were famous for making cheese with holes. There was active production in Norway until 1832. The cheese disappeared but the tale of its delicious taste was still in memory. In 1956, the academic community at the Agricultural University of Norway at Ås undertook the task of reviving the cheese recipe from 1830. Professor Ole Martin Ystgaard and his team developed during his research a semi-hard, medium-fat cheese with holes, successfully combining the cheese-making traditions with modern technologies. The new cheese was named Jarlsberg after the county, where the earlier version had been made at the beginning of the 19th century. A new cheese category was established.

So, to summarize today's history lesson: Jarlsberg is Swiss cheese made by Norwegians trying to approximate the taste of Swiss cheese from memory.

Please send me cheese recommendations otherwise I may just be tempted to write about the Tre Stella mozzarella cheese ball I bought for pizza... (fortunately, I did have the forethought to pick up something a little more unusual as well).

Class dismissed!

Cheese No. 3

I am currently living on an island with no grocery store so my cheese-buying has been restricted of late. However, yesterday I had to go "cityside" so I was able to pick up something new to try:

Low-fat Cheddar (7% B.F.) with Onion, Riverside Cheese & Butter Co. (Trenton, ON), $10.99/lb

Yes, it seems wrong to be highlighting a cheese that's the antithesis of cheese but it was actually pretty good, though incredibly crumbly when sliced. I ate most of it in sandwiches with organic pea sprouts and the onion flavouring made them interesting. Also, it wasn't bland like other low-fat cheeses I've tried, though it did suffer from the same problem all low-fat cheeses do: it dried out fairly quickly.

I had wanted to try something more adventurous but I was pressed for time and when faced with a large selection of cheeses behind glass, a store I dislike, and an overly attentive salesgirl, I choked. Fortunately, while she was slicing my selection, I discovered the dollar basket and I picked up something far fattier with a proper rind that I will try tomorrow. (Unfortunately, I can't remember the name and it's in a faraway fridge so you will just have to wait until then.)

I've also been asked to pick up some pumpernickel for S. & F. so I may try to hit the St. Lawrence Market on my way to the ferry after work. That could be dangerous...

Cheese No. 2

Not having had the chance to eat any of the Island Bries in Victoria, I carried this cheese with me to Vancouver and used it in a delicious salad. I wanted to make K. dinner as a thank-you for letting me stay with her the night before my flight back to Toronto and I remembered a salad recipe in the Rebar Cookbook that included both Brie and pears. Fortunately, K. had this cookbook and I tinkered with the recipe for the "Mesclun and Fresh Pear Salad, with Brie, hazelnuts and blackberry-thyme vinaigrette." My salad was regular red lettuce, pear slices, yellow pepper slivers, almonds, and, of course, Brie, the lettuce pre-tossed with the following vinaigrette (a variation on the Rebar recipe, halved):

1/2 cup thawed frozen strawberries, blenderized
2 tbsp raspberry vinegar
2 tbsp orange-grapefruit juice
2 tsp honey
2 tsp raw sugar
1 tsp dried thyme*
4 tbsp vegetable oil
salt and pepper to taste (i.e. lots)

* would be better with 1/2 tbsp fresh

The dressing turned out really well but the cheese was the highlight of the salad: it was sufficiently salty and creamy but not too mushy, and leaving the "rind" on didn't affect the flavour at all. When we'd had enough of the greens, K. and I started picking pieces of cheese and pear out of the bowl and eating them with bits of the foccacia that accompanied our meal.

As you can see in the photo at right, Island Bries is packaged in an interesting way: it comes with a wooden coaster stamped with the name of the cheesemaker. When I was looking for info on this cheese on the Little Qualicum Cheeseworks website, there was a note about the coaster included in the cheese description: "Our best seller. Its creamy texture, velvety white rind with mushroomy overtones goes beautifully with a crisp Chardonnay. The little wooden board rescued from the burn pile of a guitar body manufacturer can live again as a coaster."

Other cheese tasting: I also ate some delicious vegetarian lasagna that B. made to celebrate my return to Toronto and going back on cheese -- her recipe used cottage cheese and mozarella (I think). She also served some tomato and bocconcini salad, which is one of the things I'd missed most about not eating cheese after discovering how fabulous the simple combo of fresh, in-season tomatoes, basil, and good-quality mozzarella can be when S. took me to Feenie's in Vancouver.

Cheese No.1

I had grand plans to ring in the new year with a party where everyone would be instructed to bring a bottle of wine and a sizeable chunk of their favourite cheese, which would be sliced up and devoured at midnight. A cheese "orgy" seemed like the proper way to end a year of not eating any cheese. When I realized that everyone I would want at such an event was going to be geographically unavailable, I scaled back my plans. A simple cheese plate to be consumed wherever and shared with whomever was around once the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve would suffice. Besides, too much cheese all at once might upset my stomach, I reasoned.

In the end, I broke my cheese fast alone, just after midnight in my parents' Metchosin kitchen, when I sliced off a couple crumbly centimetres of the aforementioned La Scala. I felt like I should make a ceremony of it, my first taste of cheese in 365 days, but I was already wearing my pajamas and Morrissey was singing about having "No regrets" on the radio.

The first taste was somewhat underwhelming: it was a familiar flavour but one I hadn't tasted in such a long time. My tastebuds seemed dulled from either my lingering cold or too much cinnamon gum but I was able to recognize that the cheese had a strong taste, sort of like an extra-aged, sharp cheddar but more sheepy.

Just now, I had a look at the cheesemaker's website to see if I could find out any more about La Scala. Here is the description I found: "A superb blend of Irish Derby and Italian asiago, giving a bold, fruity, rich-tasting cheese with a sharp bite and buttery aroma. Medium aged for outstanding taste. Versatile and delicious in cooked foods, as a snack and on cheese plates. Great with red wine or beer." Turns out the cheese also won 1st place in the 2005 British Empire Cheese Show.

For lunch, I tried a bit more, this time with Finn Crisp crackers and Gala apple slices -- alternating tasting the cheese with bites of hummous. The La Scala definitely tasted better eaten with other foods but I still didn't feel an insatiable desire to eat more than the few slices I had on my plate. But then again, I'm not craving cheese. Not even foods made with cheese that I haven't had all year - like pizza or quesadillas. Maybe that will come with time?

As for the Brie, I may try some tonight or I may save it for tomorrow. I don't want to go overboard all at once...