I’m a certified cheesophobe. I don’t discriminate on matters of race, religion, or creed but I do discriminate when it comes to goat, feta and bleu. They’re all gross. Cheese is gross. I’m a cheesophobe.
As the Archie Bunker of cheeses, I am now checking myself into cheese rehab and attempting to forge not only a tolerance but an appreciation for cheese. I began, tonight, at Whole Foods looking for a cheese that would compliment my olive bread.
I asked the cheese woman for assistance.
“Cheese woman,” I said, “I recently baked a loaf of olive bread. What cheese would go well with it?”
Cheese woman gave me a blank stare.
“Well something soft probably,” she said, “so it doesn’t overpower the bread.”
She suggested a Pyrenees.
Researching online, I see now that Pyrenees is a region in southwest France. This particular cheese was a cow’s milk cheese and looked like this:
I think it’s interesting how the holes in the cheese from fermentation mirror the holes in the fermented bread.
I bought some salad ingredients too, came home, and made a sophisticated Friday night dinner. Notice the cheese scrapings on top of the bread:
The cheese was nice, creamy, with a little bit of tang. Interesting how some of our favorite foods–bread, cheese, wine–are basically the products of spoilage. Leave something out to rot and we’ll gobble it up. Humans are so weird.
Weird in a good way. I lived in the Netherlands for three years, and for some frightening reason, couldn’t stomache cheese. Now, it’s not a good day unless I’ve had a scraping or so. Plus the embarsment of looking back and realising the time I’d wasted in yonder green lands. I began my cheese-i-osity with an excellent brie, and am now quite fond of the stinkiest of tallegios. It’s so worth it.
Try a St. Andre — it’s very rich in butterfat and is good. You can definitely get it at EatZi’s, if not Whole Foods.
I’m very proud of your foray into the world of cheese. Eventually you’ll end up like my friend Sarah, who sneaks her illegal-to-import unpasteurized cheeses back into the U.S. when she visits France, using an elaborate system that involves planting “decoy cheeses” in her luggage to throw off the “cheese-sniffing dogs” at customs.
In other words, that first bite of cheese inexorably leads to a life of crime and deception. Get to it!