a mite-y sandwich

Hi!  Third post.  Thought I’d play around a bit more with the whole fruit/cheese pairing thing like I did in my last post.  I got a little fancy with this one, however, and used TWO different cheeses.

Pave du Nord is a French cheese made from raw cow’s milk.  The seemingly-impossible bright orange color comes from annatto  (a dye made from the seeds of a tropical tree) and the crusty exterior comes from… cheese mites.  That’s right.  Hundreds of tiny, many-legged, burrowing mites.  Kinda gross, yeah?  These little buggers are part of the same arachnid family as ticks but prefer sucking down cheese to sucking down blood.  I guess I can’t argue with that?  They’re introduced to the exterior of the cheese (on purpose, oh goodness) early on in the aging process and are left to dig around on the surface for a while, which helps to flavor it.   Apparently.  It’s aged anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years and like most aged cheeses the flavor deepens and mellows the older it gets.  If you like reasonably sharp cheddar then you’d probably like this stuff.  It has a richer, smoother taste than the sort of cheddar that comes vacuum sealed in plastic at the grocer’s, though.

Taleggio is a washed-rind cheese from the Lombardy region of northern Italy.  And honestly, it kind of stinks.  But don’t let that stop you from trying it!!  It’s kind of known for its, erm, pungency, which comes from the rind being wiped down once a week with saltwater while it’s aging in a cave somewhere.  For the longest time it wasn’t available commercially in the States because US import laws suck when it comes to raw/unpasteurized milk products.  Its availability has improved in the last few years and you can even find it in the cheese sections of better grocery stores.  It’s honestly not the smelliest cheese I’ve ever eaten and its mild, almost fruity taste definitely comes as a pleasant surprise once you get past the aroma.  It has a kind of buttery mouthfeel and a bit of a tangy aftertaste.  Like most washed-rind cheeses this stuff gets kind of gooey at room temperature so if you’re going to be cutting into a wedge it’s best to do so after it’s been in the fridge for a while.

If the idea of eating a sandwich made from bug-encrusted and stinky cheeses is less than appetizing, maybe you should skip this one.  Or find suitable alternative cheeses!  The latter is a better idea, and I’d suggest going with a medium-sharp cheddar and maybe fontina?  A riper brie would work too.  If you do get your hands on some Pave du Nord cut the rind off and you’re good to go.  I went with some basic wheat bread, nothing too special and red grapes because they’re a bit sweeter than the green sort.   I realized after taking that last photo that there was waaaay too much cheese on that sandwich;  I ended up using only about half of what you see in the picture and it was more than enough.  This is only my third post, I don’t need my arteries clogging up just yet!

are these crusts golden? or are these crusts golden? good lord.

Toast the bread so it stays nice and crusty and spread some Earth Balance or other butter/butter substitute on the outsides.  Keep the pan on medium-low heat so the bread won’t burn before the cheese starts to melt.  The Taleggio did what I knew it would do, which was basically make a mess on my stovetop.  My advice would be to put the side of bread with the Pave du Nord down in the pan first and get that one going before adding the Taleggio since it will take longer to melt.  Or don’t, if you enjoy crusty chewy bits of cheese (some people do!   who am I to judge?).

No lie, this was an absolute trainwreck to eat.  Eating something like this straight off the skillet would be akin to eating a napalm sandwich so I set it aside for a bit to let the cheese cool down and re-coagulate a bit.  It was good!  The grapes added kind of an interesting texture and an excellent flavor component.  I felt a smidge ridiculous cutting them in half to put on the sandwich but I’m glad I did as they would have just rolled off the bread otherwise.  Not that slowly oozing down a veritable cheesy landslide was a better fate, though.

 

Tunes during this GC session were provided by the wickedly underappreciated Zombies in the form of their Live At BBC album which is a collection of their performances on BBC radio in the mid-60′s.  I absolutely love this band and this compilation has all sorts of goodies like friendly banter!  Covers of Curtis Mayfield and Nat King Cole songs!  And a live version of my favorite song of theirs:

Enjoy and tasty grillings to you.

luck o’the irish cheddar

A friend of mine in Dublin sent me this cookbook and an issue of Easy Food magazine this past Christmas (such excellent gifts!  and benefiting a charity!) and I was stoked to see that one of the recipes in the magazine was for a rather tasty-looking grilled cheese sandwich!  Okay, so there definitely were a whole bunch of other awesome recipes both in the book and the magazine that I’d love to talk about but this is first and foremost a blog about grilled cheese so that is what we’ll be focusing on here. The recipe is titled “Cheddar, Pear, and Watercress Sandwich” which loses points for creativeness but gets plenty of marks for making my mouth water just by reading it.  It’s no secret that fruit and cheese together make for excellent eats and I absolutely love pairing the two.   The recipe called for whole-grain bread, sharp yellow cheddar cheese, a ripe pear, a handful of rocket (what the Euros call arugula) and some butter.  Not entirely sure why they didn’t just call it “Cheddar, Pear, and Arugula Sandwich” as watercress is clearly nowhere to be found in the original sandwich.  Oh well!  The arugula at the grocer’s was looking a wee bit suspicious so I ended up going with watercress anyhow.  Cress is a bit tangy and has less of the peppery bite that arugula has.  I wanted to keep the ingredients as Irish as possible so I used Killaree Cheddar from Kerrygolds Farms as well as their Irish butter.

Killaree is fairly sharp, though definitely not the sharpest cheddar I’ve ever eaten.  If I were pretentious about this sort of thing I’d describe it as robust, full-bodied, buttery with smooth grassy notes.   As I am merely an amateur cheeseologist, however, I’m just going to say that it’s decent.  Relatively inexpensive as far as cheeses go which is a plus if you’re looking for something cheap but good.

While my bread was toasting I sliced a d’anjou pear fairly thin and grated the cheese.  Grating the cheese makes it melt quicker than just slicing it!

My version vs. the original recipe.  It says it’s “ideal for sharing” but I’m fairly confident that won’t be happening once this sandwich gets to grillin’…

Ok so I realize that there are two distinct camps of grilled cheese makers: the ones who butter their bread before they put it in the pan and the ones who melt the butter in the pan, then put the bread down.  I am firmly in the first camp as I feel the bread browns more evenly/gets less soggy but everyone has their own technique.  I tried it the other way round this time, melting the butter in the pan first and then putting my toasted bread down.  Eh.  Sometimes it’s nice to do a thing if only to remind yourself why you don’t ever do it.

Finished!  Sharp cheddar gets less melty and gooey than milder cheddars do which is why you don’t see cheese oozing out all over the place.  I didn’t completely overdo it on the stove, either, so the pear and cress retained a bit of crunch and freshness.  The saltiness of the cheese combined with the sweetness of the fruit and the tanginess of the greens, tied together with the heartiness of the whole-grain bread, made for a pleasant combination of flavors and a suprisingly light sandwich.  A definite do-again for warmer days.

 

 

Oh, and I should mention that the soundtrack to my grilled cheesemaking this go around consisted of tunes from the multi-talented, multi-instrumentalist and all around niceguy So Cow.  Who, much like today’s recipe, happens to be from Ireland.  And happens to play lovely little catchy noisy pop numbers about nerdy things like Korean actresses and eating popcorn.  Not necessarily in the same song.