Cheese of the Week: Red Leicester

Today’s cheese selection is the classic British cheese, Red Leicester. Red Les (easier to type!) is really pretty. The color originally came from carrot or beet juice (would be fun to taste one still made with them!), but now it is usually (as in the case with this one) comes from the addition of annatto. It is made similarly to cheddar, but Red Les is hard and crumbly. It’s salty (mmmmm…salt) and nutty and crumbly at first, but then as you chew it, the crumbly bits soften and massage your taste buds. It’s very clean tasting with the teensiest smoky aftertaste. It pairs extremely well with mango!

This Somerdale Red Les tastes like a fairly mature Red Les, with a nice tang. It appears to be a farmhouse version with the telltale cloth marks on the rind. Farmhouse makers will mature it in cloth, the old way, to allow better flavour development says Wikipedia.  And whoever wrote that must know, being British and spelling flavor “flavour”.

This Red Les is a cheese that I think would go very nicely with a beer — not too dark of a beer, you want something to contrast with the light, nutty taste of the cheese. Maybe a pint or two of lager and a packet of crisps with it.

The Somerdale Red Leicester is $19.99/lb at WF. Very lovely, I give it four curds!

Cheese of the Week: Doux De Montagne

Doux De Montagne is mysterious!  It’s a semi-soft cheese with a beautiful dark red, almost mahogany rind.  I like her rind.  That sounds rather dirty, doesn’t it?  :-)  But it’s a good solid rind, not one of those Am-I-supposed-to-eat-it-or-not-rinds.

Doux [You can call her Doux after you've gotten to know her.  But you might want to address her as Ms. De Montagne at first. ] has a very subtle smell, but when it’s in your mouth – it’s like a Charles Ives symphony of tastes.  It’s salty, tart, and very quietly, a subtle and creamy sweetness.  It’s a profound cheese.

The site http://iledefrancecheese.com/ has this to say about Doux De Montagne:

Ripened in the age-old tradition, Doux de Montagne ( Doo deh Mon-than-yeh) originates from the Monts du Velay region of France. Its name, word by word, means “soft” or “smooth (doux)” and mountain (montagne). It is a delightful cheese, and matches well with ales, light sparkling wines, and champagne. Try it sliced on a sandwich, or as part of a cheese platter. It’s also great as a snack before or after dinner.

Doux de Montagne is $18.99/lb. at Whole Foods.  Heartily recommended!

Marcella Hazan, Julia Child and the great chicken boning extravaganza

A while back, I decided to try a recipe by my favorite Italian cookbook author, Marcella Hazan.  I was using the instructions from her wonderful Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  It is really an amazing book, and most of the recipes are so easy and incredible.  It makes me happy that I have it on my iPad as well as having the book (and the original books upon which it is based).

For example, there is a pasta sauce made entirely of onions.  Ok, there is some salt, pepper, white wine and parsley.  And some freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano tossed in at the end.  But it’s indescribably good.  One of her most famous recipes is her roast chicken with lemon.  The ingredients are a whole chicken, salt, pepper and two lemons.  It is so good.  Trust me.

So I decided to try her recipe for boned stuffed chicken.  I have a particular fondness for roast chicken anyway.  So I looked over her directions for boning a chicken and gave it a whirl.  It was a total pain and as I recall, I gave myself a huge cut with the knife I was using.  But it tasted amazing.  And I’ve often thought about it, but didn’t want to go through another boning adventure.

I think I’m turning Japanese…

I realized this morning that I’m coming up on five years of Russian studies.  And there is still so much to learn.  It’s a hard language.  You can see my Russian blog for details.

So I decided that it was time to take on a new challenge.  I’m not ending my Russian studies.  I feel like that is a permanent part of my life now, like music, cooking, etc.  I’ve been learning some Korean phrases here and there, and it’s been fun to go into a Korean restaurant and be able to say something in Korean.

But I’ve decided that Japanese might be more useful.  I love the original Japanese Iron Chef, and I’ve collected a lot of episodes in original Japanese without subtitles that were never shown on the Food Network.  For example, there was the ostrich battle.  Maybe they thought that American audiences couldn’t handle that.  The only glimpse of it that we got was the blonde lady in the opening sequence.  She’s an Australian chef named Gillian Hirst.  Hey, you can watch this episode on YouTube now!

Alright, so being able to watch and understand the Ostrich Battle probably isn’t all that urgent of a need, but it does sound like fun.  Plus my wife is willing to learn some Japanese with me, which is a big plus.  My son Jeff has absorbed a surprising amount of Japanese just from watching endless hours of anime.  My step-son Malcolm took Japanese in school.  And I have friends who speak Japanese fluently (Hi Yasmin!) and of course I LOVE Japanese food.   I love to eat it and to make it.  I love going to Japanese markets and it would be extremely helpful to know some Japanese when heading out to my local Nijiya Market.

So we’ll see how it goes.  So far, after 3 days of study , I’m blown away by how EASY the grammar is!  Perhaps that’s a reaction to studying Russian.  Russian grammar is legendary in its difficulty.  I’m not worried about how far I get with Japanese.  Anything counts.  The main thing is to learn and have fun.

Cheese of the Week: Port Salut…or I was just giving you the port salute!

-I was just giving you the port salute.
-I didn’t give you the port authority to do it.
-Quick! Submerge it in the port.
-Good. Now it’s a portfolio.
-Th-th-there’s a girl in here!
-We have a girl in every portfolio.

From The Firesign Theatre port gag from the rare live version of The Giant Rat of Sumatra. Listen to the audio sample above for a longer excerpt!

Today’s Cheese of the Week is, predictably, Safr Port Salut from Whole Foods. The Safr, according to Wikipedia, comes from it’s manufacturing history:

The cheese was originally invented by Trappist monks during the 19th century at the abbey of Notre Dame du Port du Salut in Entrammes[1]. The monks, many of whom had left France to escape persecution during the French revolution of 1789, learned cheese-making skills as a means of survival and brought those skills back with them upon their return in 1815. The name of their society, “Société Anonyme des Fermiers Réunis” (S.A.F.R.), later became their registered trademark, and is still printed on wheels of Port Salut cheese distributed today.

The Port Salut found at WF is lovely, everything a Port Salut should be: creamy, mild and subtle. The flavor starts out very slightly sweet and then after a few seconds the taste starts to bloom into a divergence of tastes, and then a slightly bitter after taste that is very pleasant.

It’s $11.99/lb at WF. Recommended.

Hot Pots, Donabe and Japanese comfort food

I’ve loved Asian food ever since 1965 when I first tried it at the New York World’s Fair.  Growing up in Vincennes, Indiana in the 50′s and 60′s, the selection of foreign cuisines was rather limited.  In fact, cuisine in general was pretty limited, as far as eating out.  Indiana’s major contribution to cuisine is probably the pork tenderloin sandwich.  And why is it no surprise to find out that Indiana pork tenderloin sandwiches have their own Facebook page?

Purple Sea Urchin

I think one of the things that I’ve always especially loved about Asian food is the abundance of fresh, seasonal vegetables, and the seemingly endless variety of things that Asians will eat.   Some of the stuff in it’s native form doesn’t even remotely look like food.  You have to picture a guy who sees a sea urchin with it’s hard shell and spikes and then  says to himself, “I’m going to crack that sucker open and whatever I find inside, I’m gonna eat”.

My friend and sushi mentor Nogy once said about me:  ”Bruce will eat anything that doesn’t eat him first”.  I considered that high praise indeed.

But I didn’t set out to talk about sushi.  I wanted to talk about Japanese Hot Pots.  Many people aren’t familiar with the term “hot pot”.  Some think it refers to the hot stone used for some Korean dishes like bibimbap, where the food literally cooks on the plate.  Those are delicious indeed, but not a hot pot.  If you’ve ever had the famous Japanese dish Sukiyaki, you’ve had a hot pot.  Basically — it’s a stew.  You put a bunch of stuff in a pot with some liquid, and pretty soon you’ve got dinner.

Cheese of the Week: In honor of Hubert Sumlin, Bleu d’Auvergne

One of the truly great bluesmen died recently.  Hubert Sumlin played guitar for Howlin’ Wolf, but it might be better said that he was an integral part of Wolf’s music.  Howlin’ Wolf’s importance in Blues music is self-evident.  So in honor of his passing, I selected a blue cheese for this week’s Cheese of the Week:  Bleu d’Auvergne.

Just like goat or sheep cheese, people’s reaction to blue cheese can be all over the map.  I opened up my package of cheese about 15 minutes ago here at my desk.   Minh, one of my co-workers said, in complete seriousness,  ”Oh, man!  Look at your shoes.  Somebody stepped in dog shit.”    He looked rather amused when I told him it was simply my blue cheese, and said, “Oh, well…I don’t eat cheese, so…”, and walked out of the room.  :-)

Wikipedia says about Bleu d’Auvergne:  ”Bleu d’Auvergne has a strong and pungent taste, but to a lesser extent than other blue cheeses; it is less salted, with a creamier and more buttery taste and a moister texture.”   I dunno, it’s pretty darn salty and pungent to me.  I like blue cheeses, so it’s ok, but to me it’s a little on the edgier side.

Bleu d’Auvergne is $13.99 at Whole Foods.  I don’t know if there is a NSFW (not safe for work) warning for smelly cheese, but if there is, then I guess it would have to apply to this one!

Cheese of the Week: Somerdale Wensleydale with Cranberry

This week’s Cheese of the Week is one that looks as festive as it tastes.

At first I was a little shocked by the thought of adulterating a perfectly wonderful Wensleydale with stuff that in general I only like when it comes out of a can and remains can-shaped, albeit jiggly.

Most Americans so closely associate cranberries with Thanksgiving that many US Beatle fans couldn’t believe that John Lennon said “Cranberry sauce” at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever (and not the often quoted “I buried Paul”).  But of course that’s exactly what he said before it was made less intelligible by the reduction in the tape speed, done by George Martin to more closely match the speed and key of the first section.  But surely everyone knows that story by now.

“What’s wrong with Wensleydale?”, some of you Wallace and Gromit fans might be asking.  Well, I’ll tell you:  I don’t know.  It’s wonderful stuff.   This Wensleydale is a bit creamier than I remember from Wensleydales past, and sweeter.  I suspect that this is done to make it blend more easily with the cranberries.  If so, it’s a success!  It’s hard to step eating it, and tastes almost like cheesecake, it’s so luscious.

Definitely recommended.  It’s not something I would want as often as Long Clawson Cotswold, the cheese with the chives in, but it is a very lovely cheese in taste and appearance.

The Somerdale Wensleydale with Cranberry is $12.99/lb at Whole Foods.

Cheese of the Week: Mitica Drunken Goat

Mitica is, according to the site elegantfoods.net, “a brand representing top of the line products imported from Portugal, Italy and Spain”.  Drunken Goat cheese is so called because the rind is immersed in red wine.  The Mitica version is quite mild for a goat cheese with a lovely nutty bitter aftertaste.   It goes very well with fruit and I think it would be great with something like a port, which unfortunately I can’t verify right now.

Goat cheese probably isn’t for everyone, but I think everyone should try it at least once. I love goat meat too, though. There are some nice places in Korea-town in LA that specialize in goat. Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly particularly recommends Bulrocho Korean Restaurant.

The Mitica Drunken Goat is $16.99/lb. at Whole Foods.  The sign in the photo was taken at Trader Joe’s (not by me).  You can click on it to see it in it’s original Flickr feed, where credit is given to the artist.

Cheese of the Week: Long Clawson Cotswold

This is the first in what may be a series of 1…maybe 2 posts if I’m doing my average.  If I actually continue doing it, it will be sort of a “cheese diary”.   It occurred to me one day as I was staring at the glorious array of cheeses in Whole Foods that I would probably never get around to trying in my lifetime [catch breath] that I ought to consider trying some of them.  So I got the idea that once a week I would pick up a cheese and have it over the next 2 or 3 days as a snack along with some pre-sliced fruit at work.

This week’s cheese is Long Clawson Cotswold.  It’s just delightful from the get-go and British to the backbone, where ever a cheese keeps his backbone.   It’s a cow cheese, and is a lovely pale color — I’m sure real food writers have words to describe food colors better than say, “orange” for cheese.  It’s kind of a creamy light orange with beautiful flecks of green chives.  It gets the coloring from annatto, which is also used for coloring in other cheeses, such as  Cheddar, Gloucester cheese, Red Leicester, Gouda and Brie.  It has a wonderful creamy texture, lovely for spreading, except I don’t have any crackers.  Maybe I’ll bump into somebody doing a “Cracker of the Week” blog.

 

I’m not shilling for Whole Foods, by the way, they don’t need my help.  They just happen to be the nicest purveyor of cheese in my neighborhood.  The Long Clawson Cotswold is $15.99/lb. at WF.   The fruit is mango, strawberries and blueberries.  Some mangos were consumed in the process of producing this post.