I am officially in love with a cheese guru. He wore a bow tie!
There is only one word for our first cheese lecture. Inspiring. The man knows his stuff!
We worked our way through Greek Yoghurt, Vulscome, Selles Sur Cher, Fromage Frais, Buffalo Mozzarella, Somerset Camembert, Emmental, Stilton Cropwell Bishop, Reggiano, Ricotta, a little Quicke’s Farmhouse Cheddar, Gjetost, and Munster working from the mild cheeses to the strongest in order to retain the palate.
I love Munster. Soft cheese; unpasteurised milk, coated in a neon orange blanket of bacteria. Drool.
The best idea of the night had to be the idea to serve a cheese plate of, “Oh my God! What the hell did I just eat???” Serve a blue cheese plate! Five kinds of blue cheese with a little drizzle of honey. Serve a goat cheese plate! Suggest with each plate only one kind of wine (“chef suggests…”) and if the customers argue with you, that’s a success! Get people talking!
He had quite a lot to say about the safety and health benefits of eating cheese! Despite the fact that over £1,200,000,000 worth of cheese is sold per year in the UK, only 2 cases of food poisoning have been attributed to cheese over a four year period. Usually, the food poisoning has nothing to do with the cheese, but rather the handling of it or the contamination of it by other sources. Hard cheese has a very low active water content (the moisture available to support bacteria) and it usually has high salt and acidity, which does not support bad bacterial growth. Pregnant women are allowed to eat hard cheese! I would like to say, though, that my guru believes that cottage cheese is an abomination and should be banned! Soft cheeses are prone to problems, and the taking out and putting back into fridge of cottage cheese, as well as the contamination of the cheese by using multiple spoons is just a recipe for disaster.
Points to research:
Children with autism have been recommended to eat live yoghurt as a part of their diet and MS sufferers have been recommended a diet containing raw cheese. Anybody out there have any more information on this?