sun-dried tomato, pesto, chevre

This post is coming nearly a week late as I was having problems formatting it.  Wordpress’s post editor wasn’t putting breaks in between paragraphs and that was making things annoying to read. For whatever reason it seems to be working now so I won’t complain any further.  No need to jinx it!

Anyhow, this edition of Golden Crusts is brought to you courtesy of my iPhone (again!  have YOU seen my digital camera anywhere?  this is getting annoying) and also courtesy of my friend Melissa’s kitchen.  Melissa does neato draw-y and screenprint-y things over at Sweet Crow and is an amateur cheeseologist much like myself.  Making food with friends is always way more fun than making food by yourself and I think I’m going to make that a regular part of this blog.  She was nice enough to be my first test subject, ahem, partner in crime!  Plus her kitchen is about five times the size of mine so it was nice to cook in a space that didn’t feel like the inside of a shoebox.  Thanks, yo!

So at the very end of last week’s post I hinted at doing a sandwich for this week using a non-cow’s milk cheese.  Even in this day and age the thought of eating something that came from a sheep or a water buffalo makes a lot of people a bit squeamish (like cow’s milk cheese bored into by mites didn’t?  who am I kidding) so I figured it would be the best idea to start with something basic and not super crazy.  Like chevre!

Chevre is a cheese made from goat’s milk.  The word ‘chevre’ is French for goat which makes it probably one of the most aptly named cheeses around.  It’s pronounced “shev” or “shev-ruh” depending on the level of pretension you’re comfortable exhibiting.  I say go all out and say it in the Frenchest way possible.  While the name is applied to any sort of cheese made from strictly goat’s milk it’s most commonly used to refer to the semi-hard variety that can be found in most grocery stores.  It kind of looks like regular cream cheese and has a similar texture.  You can get it aged (usually no older than four or five months) or fresh (no more than a day or two old!).  Young chevre has a really smooth mouthfeel and a rather mild but distinctly tangy flavor.  Aged chevres have a lower moisture content and as such aren’t as soft and have a stronger, saltier bite to them.  If you’ve never had it before, my advice would be to go for the younger, softer stuff.  It’s super common to find chevres that are flavored with any number of things, from herbs to dried fruits to even bee pollen.  The chevre I used for the sandwiches was coated in cracked black peppper.  Delicious!

We also used sun-dried tomatoes, basil pesto (I just got pre-made stuff but if this were the summertime I’d be making my own because fresh pesto is AMAZING), and fresh white bread from the Whole Foods bakery.  I think the label said “rustic Italian”?  While I was toasting the bread and getting everything else ready I soaked the tomatoes in freshly boiled water to rehydrate and plump them up a bit.  You can skip this step if you’d like but doing so will make them kinda toughand super chewy.  If that’s your thing, more power to you.  It’s not mine, so they got a ten minute soak.  One half of the sandwich got a pesto-tomato treatment, the other half got chevre-d.  If you let the cheese come to room temperature it becomes super spreadable and easier to handle.

 

On the stove.  The heat distribution on the skillet was a bit uneven but no harm, no foul.  This bread is kind of on the biggish side so these weren’t the easiest to cleanly flip.  In the future I’d either use smaller bread or a bigger spatula.

Action shot!  Look at me go.

 
Crusted and golden.  Chevre doesn’t really do a whole lot in the way of melting all over the place when heated so thankfully this wasn’t a very messy sandwich to eat.  It was, however, incredibly filling.  And delicious, did I mention that?  Melissa took one bite of hers and simply said “yes.”  Quite the perfect compliment, I think.  The pepper coating on the cheese added the slightest bite to an otherwise savory sandwich.  I’d definitely be interested in trying this one again using a different sort of pesto/veggie combination, maybe sun-dried tomato pesto and grilled asparagus?  What are your ideas?  Let me know in the comments section below!

 

 

 
Tuneage this week was provided by the Bomb.  Bit of a Chicago punk rock supergroup – Mike and Pete from the recently-disbanded Methadones and Jeff Pezzati from Naked Raygun on vocals.   Musically they’re just about everything I want from a punk band:  relentless rhythm, crunchy guitars, lots of melody and more sing-alongs than you can shake a stick at.

so tired of leftovers

Hey!  Hope everyone (all two of you reading this, that is) had a delicious Thanksgiving.  The week after T-day is usually the week I get sick of having leftovers every day and start getting creative with them.  Since this is a blog about grilled cheese I figured it would be kind of fun to do something leftover-related.  My Thanksgiving was vegetarian this year so I didn’t actually have any turkey on hand but luckily some carnivorously-inclined friends were more than happy to donate some of their extras to the glorious GC cause.  Thanks H&R!

I should apologize in advance for the kind of shitty quality of these photos.  I seem to have misplaced my digital camera (why is it that stuff always goes missing when I try to organize?) so my iPhone had to suffice.  It did the trick, I guess, but hopefully the digicam will turn up on the sooner side of sooner or later.

 

Probably one of the most popular and well-known of all the soft rind cheeses, Brie has its origins in northern France and is made from cow’s milk.  The outer rind is treated with a type of penicillium mold and aged for a short while, generally only about a month or so.  It’s possible to get Bries aged for longer than that but they’re far less common.  The cheese I used in this sandwich is a triple cream Brie.  It’s distinguished from double cream Brie by having a higher cream-to-milk ratio (usually around 75% for triple cream compared to 60 or so percent for double) and this gives it an extra creamy, velvety smooth texture.  The flavor is very mild and mellow, slightly salty and with the vaguest hint of ammonia thanks to the penicillium.

 

 

This triple cream was made by a French cheesemaking company called Belletoile and imported into the US.  The rind of a Brie is completely edible and imparts a unique flavor component to the overall taste of the cheese but if you’re not into it, you can totally just cut it off and just use the innermost paste.   Nobody will fault you for it!  Brie is generally served at room temperature where it’s fantastically spreadable.  Its mild flavor is perfect for both sweet and savory pairings and I’ll be doing a little bit of both with this one!

 

 

Like I said at the beginning of this post, everything in this sandwich was leftover from Thanksgiving dinner.  The bread is rosemary sourdough from Whole Foods, I love sourdough and I LOVE rosemary in just about anything so expect to see more of this in future posts.  Leftover turkey breast and homemade cranberry relish.  I made mine using this recipe as a base (I substituted about half of the grapefruit juice for that of a satsuma since those are delicious and in season here) but I think just about any sort of cranberry sauce could work.  Probably even the jellied canned stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I toasted my bread a little bit and spread the cranberries out on one slice, then the Brie and turkey on the other.  You can kind of see in the picture how the cheese is already starting to melt on the warm toast, soft cheeses by nature have a lower melting point than hard cheeses.  I put a little EB (Earth Balance) on the outsides of my bread before I set the whole thing to the skillet.

 

Ok, so remember how in my last post the Taleggio essentially turned into queso napalm once I put it on the stove?  Yeah, same deal here.  It’s just what happens with soft cheeses.  Add a little heat and things get a bit messy.  Doesn’t really affect the taste any, just makes it a bit more difficult to handle until the cheese cools down.

 

What a mess.  A delicious, delicious mess.  Turkey tends to be on the dry side and leftover turkey is just an invitation to blandness but sticking it in the middle of this sandwich was a great way to get around all of that.  If you’re of the vegetarian persuasion you could even just omit the turkey entirely from this.  The savory rosemary bread, tart sweetness of the cranberry relish and the creamy mellowness of the cheese all end up being fantastic together.  And the nice thing about leftover sandwiches is that you can use whatever you’ve got hanging around in your fridge.  I bet this would be good/maybe a little ridiculous omitting the cranberries and using gravy instead.  Or get carb’d out with stuffing.  Whatever, really.

 

I spent the holiday with an old friend from my suburban Chicago higschool punk rock days and as people who have known each other for nearly a decade are often wont to do we did perhaps quite a bit of reminiscing and maybe more than a little remembering of times past.  One of the bands from our county was Sig Transit Gloria, a few dudes from Villa Park who played poppy keyboard stuff that was sooo catchy and awesome.  I saw these dudes in a barn once when I was probably fifteen or so and the singer took microphone privileges away from the keyboard player during their set for talking back and it was CRAZY, MAN.  If I remember correctly they broke up not too long after that which I guess was no surprise but still a huge bummer to my teenage self.  Even more of a bummer was having to miss the reunion show they played in Chicago the day before Thanksgiving last week due to differences in location.  Sometimes living in the South sucks.  My friend and I definitely jammed these guys during dinner the next day and it was awesome/maybe a little embarrassing at how many of the lyrics we still knew, so many years later.   Oof.

 

Next week I have every intention of breaking the cow’s milk streak I’ve gone on in the last few entries and making a grilled cheese using a cheese from an animal that is not a cow.  Stay tuned!