Archive for January 18th, 2011

Ok, ok, I hear you.  Epic fail on eating and writing about cheese.  I’m working on turning my life around.  More cheese eating and writing. I promise.

Two days ago I was lured in cheddar–the aisles of  Whole Foods can be a dangerous place.  While shopping for the ingredients for cabbage soup (which turned out ok, but not great and will be the subject of a future post) I spotted them.  Two types of cheddar:  Isle of Mull Cheddar and Borough Market Cheddar.  Fortunately there were small enough pieces of each so that Meg and I could afford to buy a little of each.  The Borough Market was aged one year and the Isle of Mull was aged 60 days.

The appearance of each cheese was very different.  The Isle of Mull was a light orange but has huge visible veins of mold running though it.  Yeah, cheddar can have that too!  And it’s so good!  Usually, the intensity is way lower than with a blue cheese, but it still packs a little bit of the kind of blue cheese punch that wrestles with the cheddar flavors.  The Borough Market, on the other hand, was much lighter, almost an off-white.

The texture of each was also very different.  In fact Meg had me try to judge which one was which–I was able to correctly guess which the older cheese was (the Isle of Mull) because of its relatively harder texture.  The younger cheese (the Borough Market) was much more creamy.  When you think about cheese-making, it makes sense that the older the cheese, the less creamy it will be.   As the cheese sits around, building flavor and waiting for me to eat it, the moisture is slowly sneaking off.  The Isle of Mull, though less creamy was a far cry from a hard cheese.  The Borough has some nice little crunch to it, but again, nothing like you would find in, say, a Parmigiano Reggiano.  The Isle of Mull had just a few crunchies, maybe one or two in every bite.

Now the flavors.   The first bites of the Mull had a good balance of the blue cheesiness and the cheddar flavors, but the bites of the veins in the cheese overpowered the inherent cheddar taste–though it did it in a strange way, the cheddar flavor at these points seemed lower and the blue cheesiness only marginally higher (not punching you in the face).  The taste of the Mull fit this pattern from nose to rind.  The Borough, on the other hand, changed as you moved from nose to rind.  The first bites had some complex flavor with some blue cheesiness lingering in the background, but as we ate through it, the blue chessiness grew stronger and stronger until it was hitting you over the head!  A very interesting experience.

All in all, two good cheeses that remind me that I want to have more cheddar in my life!

An aside:

Meg noticed that while we’ve been shopping lately I’ve found my self stopping and scanning the mustard (often reading some out load to her).   I didn’t realize this, but she thinks I’m on the verge of a “mustard phase” and I have to say that I think she might be right. Stay tuned.