On the 18th we went to Zingerman's to taste British cheeses. Zingerman's has a vast array of comestibles, and an energetically evangelistic staff eager to convert you, me, and everyone else, to the proposition that all food is *not* created equal. Where else can you taste the cheese (olives, olive oil, even) before you buy?
To forward their educational mission, they also have formal tastings of various kinds. You will recall I tasted apples, last fall..........
Our foodie daughter checked to see what might be tasted when she was home for spring break. British cheeses were scheduled during the time she was here, so British cheeses we tasted.
Here is what we saw as we waited for all the tasters to arrive.
Palate cleansers. This was Kerry Gold butter, from Ireland. Wow. YUM. Butter is not something I want to be eating more of, so I don't think I'll be paying a premium for the best, but ... wow.
The presentation began with some info about cheese making -- milk, inoculated with the sorts of bacteria used to make yogurt, the bacteria allowed to do their thing, add rennet (which makes it more solid), cut the result into pieces, (not sure if there is always cooking at this stage, but at least sometimes there is), now we are at the "curds and whey" stage -- decant the whey, salt the curds, put in a mold of some sort, press, store until ready.
Of course every part of this process affects the end result. The milk -- what kind of mammals, what they ate (spring grass and flowers, or silage in the winter?), how fresh the milk, what the butterfat content is, was it pasteurized...... The exact bacteria. The amount of time it rests during the different phases. The amount of cutting (bigger or smaller curds). The mold. The amount of pressing of the curds. The way the cheese is prepared for storage -- wrapped in cloth, waxed, rubbed with wine or other spirits. Where the cheese is stored as it ages. How it is handled as it ages (continuing rubs with alcohol?). How long it is aged.
Different environments will naturally result in the production of different cheeses. Some landscapes are more suited to sheep or goats than cows. Different places have different plants. Etc, etc, etc.
The point was made that Britain has a much more uniform environment than other European countries (France, say, with the much-warmer south and "real mountains"). It was also stated that the human environment -- culture/society/tradition -- is more similar across Britain, so cooking/recipes are more similar, including cheese-making.
Hence British cheeses as a group are more like each other than, say, French cheeses as a group are alike.
British cheeses tend to be on the dry and crumbly side, because the curds are cut relatively large and there is less pressing of the curds in the mold. They tend to have moldy exteriors (often cloth-wrapped) rather than waxed exteriors or exteriors that are regularly wiped with alcohol.
If you look at the closeups in the third pic from the top of this post, you can see that dry, crumbly look. (Think of the difference between what you see there and a Gouda, or a Brie........)
Another factor which had a huge impact on British cheeses was WWII. During WWII, cheese-making was nationalized and factory-ized. Instead of hundreds or thousands of small local producers making cheese from their own milk, the milk was shipped off to large facilities and made into a standardized product. In the interest of keeping people fed as efficiently as possible, this was probably necessary, but a huge amount of cheese-making knowledge and tradition was lost.
It is only in the last few decades that British cheese-making has made a recovery. Some of the old cheeses are still making their way back to our palates -- at least as some very knowledgeable people remember them.......... (In the USA, there never was the same sort of hundreds-of-years-old family traditional cheese-making. Artisan cheese-making is happening here, but is at least 15-20 years behind Britain. I never thought of any of this.................)
Ok. The cheese.
Here my food-blogging skills are lacking -- I remembered to take a pic of almost all of the samples we tasted, but the pics........... Almost all so blurry they aren't worth the electrons they're printed on. I suppose it's not that big a loss -- most of those samples didn't look *that* different from each other...........
We tasted Mrs. Appleby's Cheshire, John Loomis's Great Lakes Cheshire (made at Zingerman's creamery), Sparkenhoe Red Leicester, Joan Cross's Cotherstone, Ramhall Berkswell, The Jones' Lincolnshire Poacher, Jamie Montgomery's Cheddar (from June of 2007 and from October of 2007), Ogleshield, Irish Coolea, Dunhallow Ardrahan, The Grubb's Cashel Blue, Schneider's Stitchelton, Beenleigh Blue, and Harbourne Blue. In that order.
They started us with the most similar ones, so that we would get to those while our palates were at their freshest, and moved us along to the stronger cheeses later.
This is the Red Leicester. Cheeses are more yellow when the milk-producers are eating fresh foods with more color. This has always been thought to be desirable, and adding yellow color to cheese (annatto, often) is an old idea. As people do, some ran with this idea, and more and more and more color was added. Red Leicester has a lot.
As you see, this is just the rind remaining. The taste did get stronger as one got near the rind, and in most cases I chose not to eat it.
I found all of these first cheeses to be good, but not the "Oh, *wow*" I got with the butter. They were different from each other, in the sense that you could tell them apart, but not in the sense that you'd necessarily think of them for different uses. (Or not that *I* would think of them for different uses....)
This one is the Lincolnshire Poacher. It's very like a cheddar, but made in the wrong place to be called a cheddar, if I am remembering correctly.......
Here comes the most interesting thing to photograph.
They cut a new wheel of Jamie Montgomery's cheddar for us. This wheel weighed 53 pounds, I do believe. I never thought of cheese-making as being physical hard work, but we were told that in the early months of storage, cheeses are flipped each day. If you make 22 53-pound wheels every day........................
The cutting is done with a wire which has wooden handles on the ends. First, a knife is used to score the rind on all four corners of the middle.
Once the rind is scored, the wire is aligned with the scored places.
You can see the wire, near the tag. See how the wire disappears into the cheese at the corners (if a cylinder can be said to have corners!), the top and bottom?
The actual cutting is underway. See one of the wire's wooden handles just below the cutter's thumb? that handle rests on the table, just outside the cheese. The wire wraps all the way around the cheese, and the cutter pulls on the handle at the other end of the wire, drawing the wire through the cheese.
You can tell from looking at his hands and arm that this, too, is hard work.....
Two neat halves, revealing the interior! Seen for the first time ever!
We were told that a cheese is never better than when it is opened.........
Note that the process for turning halves into quarters is beginning.
See the wire disappearing into the cheese?
The wire was used for making smaller pieces of the quarter.
Beautiful, in a quiet and tasty way............
Jamie Montgomery is said to make the highest quality cheddar in the world.
This was the younger of the two wheels of Jamie Montgomery's Cheddar that we tasted. I liked it better than the older one. It was quite tasty.
Having tasted all the cheeses that were most similar to each other, we launched into the ones that were more different.
Sheep's milk. Goat's milk. Different methods of storage.
We were told that (at least some) Irish cheese is quite different from the average British cheese. That Ireland has always been "more European" -- more influenced by France and other parts of Europe than England was.
The Dunhallow Ardrahan is a cheese whose rind is rubbed with alcohol, like a Brie or a Camembert, as I understood what we were told.
There are different ways to get a more creamy texture in your cheese. You can cut the curds very fine, and press them hard. This is, we were told, the way Gouda is made. Another way is to let bacteria work on the cheese. This is the way Brie, Camembert, and the Dunhallow Ardrahan are made. The DA was pretty strong, but I liked it.
After that, we finished up with four blues. We were told that the mold that blues cheese is very aggressive. That you cannot make blue cheese and not-blue cheese in the same facility -- if the mold is there, allllll cheese made there will be blue. The cheese is not inoculated with the mold; it just has it because of the environmental "contamination" (my word, not theirs). Blue cheese is often pierced to let in oxygen, but not to put the mold in. (They mentioned that one kind of blue cheese -- I think I remember it was a French one? -- is actually inoculated with mold, but that is the exception for blue cheeses rather than the rule.)
I am not a fan of blue cheese. Even, as it turns out, these really excellent examples (the most expensive cheese we tasted was a $45 a pound blue). Of these, the only one I would choose to eat was the Stichelton. It turns out that Stiltons, nowadays, are made with pasteurized milk. Of course, historically, milk was not pasteurized, and no cheese was made from pasteurized milk.
We were told that eating fresh cheeses made from unpasteurized milk may be a dicey proposition, but that as cheese ages, it gets drier, and the salt content rises as the moisture leaves, and that the friendly bacteria in the cheese also are detrimental to the harmful ones. That a cheese made from unpasteurized milk but aged at least 60 days is just fine to eat.......
Anyway -- the Stichelton is made the same way as a Stilton, only from unpasteurized milk. I thought it was not bad (not sure I'd choose it over another [not blue!] cheese, but if it was the only cheese there to eat, I would eat it). I ate mine and my better half's, too. The other blues I tasted and did not finish.
It's too bad the "individual sample" pics didn't come out. The textures of the blues were quite different. The Stichelton was more creamy; the last two much more dry......
By the end of the evening, I was quite cheesed out. I even woke up the next morning feeling a bit bilious.
I am back to normal now and would love to go to a French cheese tasting.....
So interesting, to learn so much, to taste so all those different cheeses, and to hear what the different people in the room thought of them.........
Zingerman's is really a tremendous resource to the Ann Arbor community!
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