Cheese in supermarkets

Normally I'd wax lyrical about the delights of buying cheese from a pungent stall on a French market, or from specialists like the delightful people at Truckle Cheese who made my day at GBBF with a superb platter and friendly chat (and really excellent chutney).

But let's be realistic; most people do most of their shopping at a supermarket. Nowadays thank goodness that needn't mean ten kinds of plastic supermarket 'cheddar' and a double Gloucester that tastes like cheddar with orange colouring added.

It could mean Waitrose, which has just won the Bel Trophy at the International Cheese Awards. That's given to the retailer getting the most awards for its own line of cheeses - Waitrose for instance won classes with its farmhouse cheddar, goat's milk gouda, and Cropwell Bishop white stilton - and also for a blue vein French cheese, Lancashire, Parmesan and Gruyere.

Why Waitrose?

• Waitrose is willing to work with smaller producers and to bring more interesting cheeses into the line-up.
• Waitrose has quite a 'foodie' customer base. Some other supermarkets might find that goat's cheese, for instance, doesn't sell particularly well.
• Being cynical about the way the awards system stacks up, Waitrose therefore has a great chance of winning classes for slightly unusual cheeses while Asda, perhaps, doesn't. (I shouldn't be too cynical: to win the highly competitive Farmhouse Cheddar class is not easy for anyone. And 26 awards from 77 categories is rather striking. By comparison, M&S got a bare handful of trophies.)
• Waitrose also has a brand that is seen as a mark of quality. A cheese producer who might be a bit sniffy about working with Asda will be happy to collaborate with Waitrose.

But it's worth noting that Waitrose wasn't the only retailer to win awards.  Asda got two - cheddar cheese retailer of the year and healthy cheese retailer of the year - while Morrisons won the cheese board retailer trophy, and the Co-Op won speciality cheese retailer.  And Tesco romped home in quite a few classes, with a really good haul of trophies for individual cheeses.

Only one major chain was conspicuously absent from the awards. Sainsbury's won nothing. It got a single silver ("Any other blue vein cheese - produced outside UK") and a very highly commended. It's not obvious what's going on there, but I think I shall be steering clear of their products.

Now then, what's wrong with the awards? Well, obviously, they do nothing for the independent retailer. It's a pity - because they do support independent producers. It's a real pity there's not a class for small shops, though it might be difficult to tuck into the existing format.

In the meantime, it's nice to see that the quality of supermarket cheese is being inspected, assessed, and, one hopes, improved.

Why I love Neufchatel

Or rather, why I ♥ Neufchatel.

Photo by Myrabella on Wikipedia

It's the cutest cheese in any French market. It's made in little heart-shaped moulds. (Wikipedia says it's sometimes made in other shapes, but I've never seen them.) There is no other cheese you could actually buy as a romantic Valentine's Day present.

I expected it to be a creamy, oozing sort of cheese like a Brie or Camembert - it's another of the great Norman cheeses, along with Camembert, Livarot, and Pont-l'Eveque - but it's quite firm and chalky in texture. On the outside, it has a lovely soft rind, like white velvet - softer than Camembert; it's almost like the powdery texture of butterflies' wings. Wonderful.

As for the taste, it doesn't have the ammonia that spoils Camembert for me, but it has a combination of mushroomy flavour with a slightly lemony acid edge that makes it quite sharp. The heart might suggest a very sweet creamy and perhaps inoffensive cheese - but it's got a lot more character than that, though you couldn't call it a wolf in sheep's clothing. (A nanny goat in sheep's clothing, perhaps.)

It's beautifully spreadable - or rather, flattenable, because this isn't a cheese that's fluid, like a melting, oozing Brie.

And if this wasn't enough to love it, it's also one of the oldest cheeses in France, going back to at least the eleventh century, and possibly earlier. A little taste of history, in the shape of a heart.







PS, for American readers: I'm told there's a kind of cream cheese in the US called Neufchatel. It's not the same at all.

Brousse - ricotta with attitude!

Brousse looks a little like a ricotta - a strikingly white, quite grainy soft cheese, which comes in a little pot, just the way it was formed out of the mould.

"Brousse" by Véronique PAGNIER - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brousse.JPG#/media/File:Brousse.JPG

And it is a ricotta - a cheese made from the lactoserum, or whey as we'd say in English, that's left behind after the first chese has been made from a batch of milk.

But as you'd expect from a French cheese, it's got a bit of attitude. That's partly because it can be made from sheep's or goat's milk as well as cow's milk - depending on the location and type of cheese. There's even a single-variety Brousse, the Brousse du Rove, coming from the Rove race of goat, and made (unusually) with the milk rather than with the whey.

The Brousse I've been enjoying isn't a farm Brousse, it's just something we picked up in the supermarket. But it has that definite goaty edge. It comes over all creamy and fresh at first, with a slight citrus edge (very gentle, like a hint of lemon meringue), but then the goatier, stronger flavour kicks in, alongside the freshness. It all makes for a cheese which is light and refreshing, not mouth-clogging like a Brie, but which develops its taste in the mouth and deserves a slow appreciation.

Like fromage blanc, Brousse is often eaten with a little sugar. I like it with forest fruits - accompanied by the fruits, not mixed up with them - or on its own.

Cheese platter 101

While I tend at home to have a single cheese at a time to explore and really get to know it while it's in my fridge, for entertaining or in the restaurant the cheese platter is what the French call un incontournable.

There was a typical French cheese platter at my partner's sister-in-law's Christmas get-together in Paris - a Brie and a really oozing pale straw-coloured goat's cheese representing opposite ends of the classical spectrum, a Roquefort for 'something blue', a Caprice des Dieux for the children (sweet, white, creamy, inoffensive), and a couple of other cheeses to add some variety.

(It's a bit like the bridal dress. Something old and something new - say a 24 month Comté and a really young Selles-sur-Cher - true, nothing borrowed, but always something blue - Roquefort, or perhaps Fourme d'Ambert or Bleu d'Auvergne.

 The Guardian has just put out a fascinating article on how to make up a well balanced cheese platter. Admittedly it's by Guardian Australia, so those of us currently sitting in brilliant sunshine and temperature of minus 5 with a hard frost on the ground can ignore the summer-orientated advice re stinky cheeses. But the rest is good; particularly the advice to take the cheese out of the fridge and let it warm up to release the aromas and flavour.

 I also love the idea of pairing cheese with sweetness, such as Sienese panforte or dried apricots. Though I don't detest oat biscuits with cheese, particularly with some of the softer and stinkier.

For the Francophone, a nicely savage article proposes two alternative cheese platters, one horrific mass-produced nastiness, and one well composed classic cheeses. I'l summarise:

• If it's wrapped in aluminium or comes in mini-portions all individually wrapped, avoid. (The French haven't yet sunk to the all-time lows of pre-sliced cheese, thank the Lord.)
• You need a soft cheese (Camembert, Brie, Coulommier), a hard cooked cheese (Comté, Gruyere, Emmenthal) and a hard raw cheese (Tomme, Cantal, Saint-Nectaire), a "pas vache" (which might be goat's cheese or sheep's milk cheese), a blue cheese and last but not least, a stinky cheese.
  
• >Preferred stinky cheeses? Munster, Langres, Pont l'Eveque and Epoisse I know well - Chablis and Vieux Boulogne are gaps in my cheese knowledge that I need to make good in 2015!
• >Buy 'fromage fermier' from a small producer if you can.

Cheddar cheese

A lovely story in the Guardian about cheese making in Somerset, a great Cheddar dynasty (plus a picture of the cheese store). What's quite fascinating is the glimpse of a completely integrated agriculture in which nothing is wasted; whey is fed to the piglets (in Italy, it makes ricotta), and the pig manure is recycled to fertilise the pastures which feed the cows.

It's this relationship between the cheese and the local terroir which is missing in so much industrial cheese, made from milk tanked to a factory from far-off farms. The great cheeses of Europe all have a history that's about how farmers adapted to local conditions; local breeds of cow (or sheep, or goat), seasonality, different types of pastures, different methods of storage (notably in the great caves where Roquefort gets its flavour).

That's very similar to the world of wine where a move of just a couple of kilometres can produce a different character in the wine. Or beer, where, for instance, the lambic breweries of Belgium depend on the wild yeasts of the Senne valley, or the famed 'Burton snatch' of sulphur from the waters of Burton-on-Trent that comes through in a Burton beer.

Cheese recipe - Hungarian cheese spread

I found a Hungarian cheese recipe the other day which seems similar to the German obatzda, and decided to make it up. I particularly like the way the raw garlic cuts through the creaminess of the cheese and cream. Good on bread - excellent on toast. If you make your own cheese, it's a good way of using it fresh. Otherwise, use soft curd cheese or cottage cheese, or a mix of the two.

Ingredients: about 500g fresh curd cheese, chopped onion, chopped garlic, paprika, mustard powder, caraway seeds, a few tablespoons of sour cream

Chop your onion and garlic. Beat the sour cream into the cheese. Mix a tablespoon or two of paprika (you can use a lot more than you think!), a couple of teaspoons of mustard powder, and a teaspoon of caraway seeds into the cheese, and then add the onion and garlic.

I'm told this is traditionally made with a Liptauer sheep's milk cheese. However it works well with my own home made cow's milk cheese, and keeps a good few days in the fridge.

DIY cheese

It had to happen. I saw a cheese-making machine at a car boot sale. Time to move from being an avid consumer to making my own cheese. Three euros was my in-price. That gets me the machine, with its glass insert, and a plastic 'faisselle' or strainer-thingy inside that.
Recipes abound on the internet and all are slightly different. Some start by using a petit suisse or a fromage blanc from the supermarket as a starter. Some use rennet, some use lemon juice, some use vinegar. I've tried it all ways and it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference.

There is a kind of magic to a natural process. Making perry, or beer, or wine, through fermentation; watching your bread rise as the yeast starts pushing air out through your dough; making your own yogurt (which, in fairness, you could also use this little machine for - a cheesemaker and a yogurtmaker are not very different, it's basically a matter of keeping your milk at a constant, warm temperature).
The magic of this process is putting the milk in just before dinner time, seeing the milk just a bit thickened by the time you go to bed, and coming down early in the morning to see solids starting to clump together.
It tastes good. Light, creamy, full, fresh.
Even better, I've learned how to make ricotta. You take the whey, boil it with the addition of about another half its volume in fresh milk, add a little lemon juice, and leave it to do its thing. Strain it out, and there's the ricotta; not as creamy as what you get from the supermarket (actually I found the addition of a little creme fraiche made it taste better, but the texture was still quite granular), but wonderfully soft.
The next step, if I want to take it, will be to buy some cheese moulds from Tompress (superb if expensive supplier of all kinds of kitchen and smallholding equipment) and dry out the fresh cheese for longer storage. But at the moment, we're eating all the cheese I produce fresh, in just a couple of days, and very nice it is, with chives and a little salt, or with sugar, or served up with fruit, or used in a vegetable gratin.
We all need a little magic in our lives. For so little investment, and so little effort, I now have some cheesemaking magic in mine.