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.



   

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.

Sevre & Belle Goats Cream Cheese

Sevre & Belle comes in like a hexagonaloid case and is French.
I like the case because it has a cartoon lady goat. She has blusher on and is wearing a spiffy green cardigan - she has been dressed by French Marks and Spencers I think.

The Cheese

It is a cream cheese what comes out of a goat. However, it does not do what some goat cheese does, like smack you in the tongue going "GOAT". It is gentle, subtle. Sophisticate.

This is a cream cheese, so it is for spreading more than gorging on chunk by chunk. I tried some of it acapella first, just on a teaspoon, and it is slight, creamy, with the barest hint of a sharp note, so I might have imagined it.

I tested it on both bread and toast. It spreads better on toast, but is fine on bread, unless you is eating that shit stuff that comes in plastic and falls apart when you poke it.

The texture as you take some out with a knife is almost fluffy, and white as God's pyjamas. When you spread it, it smooths out lovely.

Cream cheeses what have been made from cow milking sometimes have a bit of a heavy, dairy aftertaste. This don't. It's superbly light and doesn't generate any weird runny liquid like the other kind neither.

I am much impressed with it, and it is another reason why people should experiment with other udders.

Emmental

It's Christmas! Yay!

So this is a Quick Christmastime Cheese Commentary.

I have aten some Emmental. First I took it orally at room temperature. I had it neat.

It is like rubber but tasted less interesting.

I then melted it between two tortillas, making a kind of spartan quesadilla, only Swiss.

Melting Emmental makes it edible.

Nanny Williams Blue Goats Cheese

I have ate new cheese!

Nanny Williams is a blue cheese made from goat lactation. It is a heavily marbled, thoroughly veined cheese with a dark rind. It is totally gnarly, with a fairly pungent aroma that carries the promise of its sharp, rich flavour.

Nanny Williams is handmade by Ness and Gwyn Williams, at the Loosehanger farmhouse in Wiltshire.
http://www.cheeseproducer.com/

The cheese what they make comes out as milk from the teats of Willowbrook Goats.

Image used comes from the WillowbrookPark blog, www.willowbrookpark.blogspot.com - used without permission - go check out their blog if you want to look at more goats.

I enjoyed the experience of eating Nanny Williams cheese. It goes good with types of preserves what are sharp and sweet. I ate some with chicken livers fried in sherry, served in a bit of baguette spread thin with some plum and rhubarb jam.

If that sounds lovely to you, I is want you to be my friend.

If that sounds horribly to you, I sadly suggest we go our separate ways, as I will be eating at different tables from the ones what you will be eating at.

THE TASTE

The taste is strong. If you don't like goats cheese, or blue cheese, then you won't like this at all probably. Its gnarly looking rind and strength of flavour will probably make you cry.

I like both blue and goats cheese, and I confess that I found it bestest to eat the cheese in small, tasty pieces. This isn't one of those "cut out a blinking great wedge and shove it in a folded bread, pretending you own a plough kind of cheeses". IT IS NOT CHEDDAR.

It is good though, as well as being a sensational experience. There's a high pitch note of flavour running through, that is approximately this colour with a touch of salt to it. Underneath that is the rolling spirals and curlicues of blue cheese flavour, and the swells of taste in it are big and well-weathered, like a much used wheel on a cart. At the bottom is a base of cream that sits quiet until the fireworks are over.


I recommend Nanny Williams to adventurous cheese novices, though this is a challenge too far, me suspects, for the babybells. Try a dairy-lea lunchable or a cheesestring instead. It's not a real cheese, but then, you're not a real man. Or woman. Or whatever you be.

In all seriousness, though, twibble blipple saddle nipple.

Recipes What I Have Cooked and Then Ate - Thaichinamese Salmon

Thaichinamese Salmon

I actually did this photopicture! I used my potato.

This meal is nutritio-licious. That's a word what I made up just for this dish. It is a sort of panfried, pan-Southeast-Asian fish dish.

What You Put In It

Salmon fillets (1 big one or 2 smalls - I use frozen as they can do less brutal to the money)

1 shallot, chopped fine

2 cloves of garlic, cored and chopped fine

1/2 a red bell pepper, in short thin slices

1 large red chili-pepper, de-seeded (if you don't de-seed it, you might have to shoot yourself)

Fresh ginger (a good knob of, sliced thin)

Fresh coriander (to taste)

Olive oil (a few teaspoons of)

Garam Masala powder (a few shakes of)

1/4 pint of Milk (from a coconut or from a cow)

How You Do The Food (serves 1 - use more of everything to feed more people)

Put the olive oil in the pan and make it warm. Turn on a middle-heat, olive oil doesn't like hot heat.

Put in the chopped garlic, shallot, chili and fresh ginger, and give it a bit of sizzle time. You don't want it to go brown though.

Put in salmon and swish it about in the juices and bits. Straight away, add the sliced red bell pepper. Sprinkle the garam masala on top. If you can't find garam masala, look for coriander powder and cardamon pods.

Fish is well easy to cook. Basically, as soon as it be more than a bit warm, it's cooked. Give it a few minutes on both sides, don't be a wet-molly.

Pour in the milk. Coconut milk be more proper like, but the stuff that you squeeze out of cows will do the job. Turn the heat low, you don't want to boil the milk. Or maybe you do, but that would make you a dick with no morals. Basically a kitten-killer. Don't boil the milk, alright?

Chuck in roughly a third of your fresh coriander, recklessly chopped.

Give it another few minutes until all the face-smacking luvverly flavours are making the milk pregnant with the yums.

Read that sentence again, it's worth it.

Take off the heat and pretend you're in one of them subtitled martial-arts films for a few seconds. Make strange faces. Punch the air and pretend you're six.


Serve in a bowl, more fresh coriander on top. This time, chop it with debonair flair. A squeeze of lime juice is an optional extra.

Drink something alcoholic and refreshing with it. I like Hooch at the moment. It's lemony.


Suggested watching material: Jackie Chan films. Films what have Takeshi Kaneshiro in (he's part Taiwanese and all hunk). Good Morning Vietnam!

Yarg.

A blog about one of my favourite cheeses.

Praise Cheeses!

The yarg cheese is one of my faves cos it is a little bit odd, like myself. You get the impression that the yarg could be that one at the party what sits in the corner talking to the host's cat, wearing a wooly jumper that will be hipster fashion in a few months but isn't yet.

Yarg is wrapped in nettles. They can't sting you though, cos they've gone all mouldy and delicious! I eat the nettles - some don't, but this is a case where the rind is edible, so it's up to you.

Yarg is Cornish. That is, the cheese is Cornish. It ain't some Cornish word dredged up from the misty past of Cornwall where they all wore paint and did naked stuff at Romans. It's not an ancient dialect word or nothing.

It's just "Gray" backwards. Yarg was made up by Allan and Jenny Gray, which makes them Dairy Heroes, God Bless Them, and may their cheeseboard forever be stocked and their fridge have jam in it. Like a lot of very awesome stuff, Yarg is from the Nineteen-Seventies. Eat Yarg while listening to Led Zeppelin's later stuff, or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars what is by David Bowie.

Yarg almost makes up for the Vietnam war but not quite.

 Above is a picture of Yarg. I did not take the picture. If you did, thank you for taking the picture, may I please keep showing it to the internet people? Otherwise I will be sad, but I will take it down.

The Important Bit

The taste! What does the yarg taste like, I hear you ask? (I don't really, as you're on the internet and I'm not psychic, I'm just being conversational and friendly, to give the illusion that what we is having here is dialogue, rather than the inept ravings of a cheese-loving lunatic with issues.)

Yarg tastes lovely and characterful, with a creamy, nutty flavour, especially where it is soft near the rind, and an undercurrent of tang. The centre of the cheese is like Caerphilly a bit, in that it is dryer and crumbly. It's sweet tangy nutty creamy and most of all I'd call it balanced. It is like the high-rope-walker of the cheese world. Very easy for a cheese-novice to eat and enjoy, even if the nettles seem a bit intimidating at first.

Eat some, cheese-bitches!