Monday, 27 October 2014

Budge It Cheese




This are the beginning of a short cereal I will be doing of cheeses that can be accrued at Supermarket deli counters, either on special offer or in a three for one type dealio, a type of bargain dairy triptych.

This time, I bought three offerings from the belly of ASDA, the Norse god of sorrow. One of the three was the Sevre & Belle Goat Cheese I did already favourably review on this very netblog. I did this as a matter of insurance against risk. However, two newcomers arrive to the table of my palate.

The first of these are this: ASDA Chosen By You Jerk Cheddar

This cheese were chosen by you. By You.

I hate you. I will never forgive you.

You and I are enemies now.


NOMENCLATURE MIS-THOUGHTS


First let us consider that name. Jerk Cheddar. Jerk. Cheddar.

Out of the contexts, this seems like a foul youthemism. Like some kind of ugly, lasciviously lactose laden lewdity.

Lewdity is now a word. You can serve it with crudités at naked parties.

GET BACK TANGENT GET BACK TO WHENCE THOU CAME THOU PESTILENT DISTRACTION

My fine protuberance is this: they should have considered the ramifications of the connotationals of this combination of words. Jerk Cheese or Jerk Cheddar is a problem to the ear. The cheese itself present many a problem further though, kingly, the oral problem.

FLAVE



I love the taste of jerk seasoning. Jerk chicken are one of those things inspired from God herself, a poultry scripture anointed with fire from heaven. It is hard for me to spake just how muchly my lusts for this Caribbean dish run rampant. One day this Blog Of Things What I Have Ate will include an entry of my humble attempts to service this cultural icon.

So consider my immediate and naïve happies at pressing my gaze on the packaging of this; a purported combination of two loves of mine, jerk seasoning and matured bovine solids.

Oh, woe. A fool, I was, a fool.

The cheese contains fruit as part of its recipe. This are usually an alarm bell with me. Fruit in a cheese can be done tolerably but by and huge, it suggestifies that the cheese isn’t that great starting out, and the solution thought up is to inject flavour in the form of lumps or shavings of some bulbous tree-borne seed-carrier or other.

I much prefer a cheese that are good, eaten with fruit that are good, rather than a cheese that is inferior, married to surplus vegetable matter.

TANGENT I DEFY YOU

The flavour is hard to describe, and that is the true true. The acid of the fruit is present, along with the thin and chemical heat of the chilli. There is no warmth or depth to the chilli flavour. Underneath it all are an overly salty cheddar, that are moist and slightly giving to the prod. Cheddar should not squelch.


This cheese is shit.


WHEN VIEWED


Orange and bespackled.

TO GOES WITH





My thinkings are that this cheese may spoil all good things. Isolate it. Quarantine it.
The only way I would consider using this cheese is melted down as a minor component in a burger, where other flavours may compensate. That been said, there are many udder alternatives that would be nicer in that role. Or roll. Whichever.



Pray for me, that the second cheese be not as Satan.   

Monday, 20 October 2014

I Are Back Like Arnold But With Cheese

 

Sorry for being away so long. Life had come between cheese and I, and thus I was absent from the webnets.

Today:

MONTAGNOLO AFFINE

!bellissimo!


A Place For Buy This Cheese

What a cracker! Only not a cracker, but cheese. People of the online world, I return to you with news of a cheese.

Molizza Filofax, Oprah, Googoo Crone, Intercourse Exploder, all browsers must bear witness. This are cheese. This be what the interknot is for!

TOPLOOK

Suffice it to say I have loved masticating this wedge of aged cow-squeeze.

Montagnolo is as Italian as adultery.* It be triple creamed. That's dairy-orgy-decadent. Think of a real, creamier-than-thou Brie, a proper uppity deli Brie, creamy as all fuck, but blue veined.

VISIONS! TEXTURE! TASTE!

In this respects it are similar in appearance to Cambazola, an production-line blue brie, often made in Bavaria for marketing reasons. Montagnolo Affine does a big creamy poo on Cambazola. It is rich, silky, and has the gentle, pervasive bite of a good blue cheese, only wrapped in NIRVANA. Not the mumble-core nineties band with the song about adolescent smells, but the Buddha one. Or something.




COLLABORATIONS

Almost anything that you like to orally ingest will work alongside this blessed cheese. Breads and crackers are basics, but you might also consider melting it on a fine beef burger, or small quantities in a bold, pragmatic lasagne, the type what has ambitions of becoming dictator of a small balkan state.

For the watchings, I would choose an easygoing culturally interesting flickerpic like The Last Samurai. No reason to overdo it with a full Kurosawa; no need for an actual classic or an art-house gasp, just bang something in the disc slit.

Music: anything on a scale from Leonard Cohen through to Babymetal


LATTERWORD

If blue veins in cheese put you off, you are failure.

I are glad to be bacK!

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

Blacksticks Blue

The Multi-Award-Winning Blacksticks Blue

The Lancastrian King of Blueness!

 
Image courtesy of ButlersLarder.co.uk - actually I didn't ask at all or that but it's basically free advertising

SEEING THE CHEESE AND SNIFFING IT A BIT, MAYBE A POKE

Blacksticks Blue resembles Stilton but are a soft orange in colour, with decent blue veining. That's a pleasant colour match, that.

Blacksticks isn't especially pungent, and it'll bring Stilton to mind on the nose, probably. It's softer than Stilton, though, with a creamier texture. You can squish it with a knife and spread it like, for sandwiches. Or on toast would be proper good. Oh, I have to try that. With Jalapeño, Lime and Coriander jam.

MMmm. Yes.

TASTE THE CHEESE

FULL FLAVOUR. Wine sometimes have like "full-bodied" written on it. Always makes me think of euphemised fat people - like myself, only I'm is not euphemised usually - anyways, this means that this cheese flavour is like well busomy. It's a buxom cheese, with big, rounded, mid-level flavours, blending tang and cream. It doesn't sing louder with any bit of its taste choir, they all hit the right level I reckon. A round taste rolls on for a bit, like a memory. Or in my case, like, a reminder.

To have some more.

WHAT MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH THE CHEESE

This cheese are kind of recognised as a proper good cheese. It has awards and everything. The Indiepedant, which are a newspaper* says it's number 7 in the top 10 British cheeses.

I think this cheese are very good. Good enough to be a Stilton understudy, but like a up-and-comer understudy. Conceivably you could make Stilton have nights off or go on holiday, and the Blacksticks Blue won't disappoint in its place. It are very creamy and would please cheese-eaters nicely just so long as they like blue cheese. And if they don't like blue cheese they're only sort of cheese-eaters anyway.

Robust flavours and creamy texture put this cheese on my personal top ten and also in my new favourite blue cheese category. Lancastrians done good.

* a "newspaper" is like a kind of tiny internet printed out on a thick kind of toilet paper, only made for a giant's arse

FRATERNISING OPTIONS

You can proper do this on its own, like in small pieces, in a lamplit room, with music on low. I won't judge you. I been there.

I reckon this cheese are pretty versatile. I would have it with grapes, to get that sweet and sharp cutting through the cream, or I'd team it with a good steak-mince burger. Cheese sauces would have a hefty flavour punch from the cheese fists of Blackstick Blue, too.

My best recommendation would be for a nice warm, fresh whole or multigrain bread. No need for butter, just bang a wedge of Bluesticks in it and munch that mother. Mmm. Peasanty bliss.

Drinkwise, get a peppery Shiraz or something with good smoke or oak - but not too much tannin would be my undereducated guess. You still want the fruit to present nice. Also a dark old ale like Woodforde's Norfolk Nog would wash it down beautyful.

Music: whatever you fancy really, though I will say it accompanied Jake Bugg very nicely.

OTHER KNOWINGS

Blacksticks Blue is cow cheese.
It is Artisanal. I hate that word, cos it combines the words "art" and "anal".


Next week, (or a week in the future, you don't own me) I will be doing a French cheese, and doing it HARD.



   





Thursday, 13 February 2014

Taleggio D.O.P.

Welcome to another edition of Cheeses What I Have Ate!!!1!


TALEGGIO D.O.P. is a wonderful cheese.


It are an Italian type cheese, in the alpine tradition. That means that when it was originally made, preservation was right up their list of wants. You want to make food what won't kill you when you come to eat it later in the year.

THE LOOKS

 Taleggio has a dishonest hard rind, with a faintly orange colour. Inside though it is fairly soft, with a slight bounce and stretch. It has a proper smell, a strong but not nasty fragrance that reminds me of the head on a beer that's just turning.

THE EATS

To taste, there is a moderate creamy body under rich flavours of salt and beer. More proper like I should say it tastes yeasty, but I don't like that word much. Best way to describe it is as a kind of buttery mix of a well-flavoured wheat beer - like what the Germans make - and a touch of brine, like the salt on well-cooked bacon.

It makes me think of sunny mornings and fry-ups and also how much I love LOVE LoVE Cheese.

REFLECTIONS ON THE CHEESE

I reckon the aromatics of this cheese will put off some of the wimps, but for the ones that man/woman right up and get on in there, it is a reassuring surprise. The flavour is not that strong, mild to moderate, and there are no sharp or high flavours like what you get with the blues or the harder Italian cheeses.


BE NICE WITH

Fruity and natural sweet flavours would be proper lovely with this cheese. Jaffa Cakes work quite well as an accompaniment, though in general I think chocolate would overpower and not go right with it.

Soft fruits and dried fruits are going to be a winner. For drinks, an un-oaked Chardonnay wouldn't go badly. Or a beer with lots of grain flavour. Fullers Honey Dew would be BANG UP IT.

If you are going to watch something while consummating with this cheese, I would recommend something comforting but with strong performances, like Perks of Being a Wallflower or About a Boy.

Acceptable listening material would be anything on the spectrum where like Toto are at one end and Radiohead at the other end. Progressive rock with folk influences works... keep it fruity and sweet, but not too fruity or sweet.

GET IT IN YOUR NECKS you won't regret it. 

SO KNOW YOU KNOW THIS:

The D.O.P. means that it were made by proper Italians rather than fake Italians, or the wrong kind of Italians.