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...

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.

The First Cheese(s)

I couldn't pick just one so I choose two. Since I'm celebrating New Year's Eve on Vancouver Island, it seemed appropriate to select Island cheeses:

1. Island Bries from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks (Parksville, BC), $3.19/100g
2. La Scala from Natural Pastures Cheese Company (Courtenay, BC), $4.29/100g

At 12:01am, the tasting begins!