Mimolette!

A couple posts back, I mentioned that a Toronto food critic's "desert island cheese" was mimolette and when my dad was in town I had the chance to try it. We were walking up Yonge St. to meet someone he used to work with and had some time to kill so I suggested we pop into All the Best, which typically has free samples on weekends. We were not disappointed: there was a guy handing out pasta and sauce just inside the door, slices of pickled beets a few steps away, and self-serve goat cheese and crackers towards the back of the store. We tried everything and it was all delicious but what caught my dad's eye was the mimolette for sale behind the cheese counter glass. James Chatto was right, the uncut cheese looks like a cross between a cannonball and a canteloupe. I didn't try any in the store but my dad did and was convinced by the taste to buy some. I'm glad he did and that he was willing to share.

I first tried the mimolette on its own and it was good: bright orange and salty, it was like a cross between aged cheddar and hard parmesan. In omelettes, for which I'm been won over to using hard cheeses, it was delicious. Not sure of its worthiness as a cheese with which to be marooned but worth a taste nonetheless.

What's Your Desert Island Cheese?

About two weeks ago, in his Toronto Life blog review of C5, one of the new restaurants in the newly "crystallized" Royal Ontario Museum, food critic James Chatto mentioned that his favourite cheese is mimolette:

I was sitting in the ROM’s new restaurant, C5, late last week, when the mimolette question arose yet again. Properly aged mimolette is one of my absolute favourite cheeses. A whole one looks like a beaten-up stone cannonball until you prize it open. Inside, the paste is dark orange and so firm that it’s better to dig out fragments with a wedge than try to cut it with a knife. The flavour is bizarrely rich, like aged gouda only much more so—like hazelnuts and caramel and condensed milk and salt—incredibly delicious and with a finish as long and intense as Göttedamarung. I think it would be my desert island cheese. Indeed, I have always imagined this was the cheese that Ben Gunn fantasized about and begged for after his sad marooning.

Which makes me wonder, what's your desert island cheese?* Post your preference in the comments and I'll try to figure out what mine is...

*provided, of course, that your island came with a way of keeping the cheese from melting...