I love cheese in almost any form or shape
At the end of last summer we spent 2 weeks in Tuscany in Italy. We were on a painting and cooking trip and stayed in a working winery in the Tuscan hills, amid the vineyards and olive groves. The food at this place was excellent and the wine, all of it various types of Chianti, was outstanding and we drank it by the bottle. But my most vivid memories – besides the great paintings I turned out – are of the cheeses we ate, morning, noon and night.
The meals
The cheeses first appeared at breakfast – a huge tray of half inch thick slabs of a whitish sheep’s milk cheese with slices of tomato on a bed of lettuce. I couldn’t resist.
At lunch I ate more sheep’s milk cheese and swished it down with Chianti.
Dinners were an unabashed orgy of sheep’s milk cheese tasting and cheese eating, accompanied by wine tasting and wine drinking. I was instantly hooked on this new way of life. My internal cholesterol counter was working overtime and a little alarm bell was ringing faintly somewhere. I emailed requests for Personal Loans so that I could stock up on cheeses and wines before I left for home.
Back home
I began the search for sheep’s milk cheese. I drove on country roads, stopped and read the little notices that folks hang on their fences, followed the arrows and got nowhere. My best effort was to find 2 places that make goat’s milk cheese, but when I saw the conditions under which it was made, I did a smart U-turn and shot out of there. Another man told me that he bought the goat’s milk at a reliable dairy, brought it home and made the cheese there under hygienic conditions. Most of the other people milked the goats themselves. It put me off, way off!
Cheese week
Imagine my delight when we received a flyer in the mail-box “Sheep’s milk cheese week at MegaMarket”. I was there tapping my foot when they arrived to open up. And there were my sheep’s milk cheeses and all priced especially low for Cheese Week. Why is it Cheese Week? Who cares, they should do it every month. I stocked up and am now taking bites of delicious gorgonzola, mouth-watering mascarpone and scrumptious pecorino every time I pass the fridge. All these cheeses contain between 25 and 30 percent milk-fat at which my doctor will have a cadenza, but I have no intention of inviting him over to sample. He would probably also frown and shake his head at the amount of red wine I’m drinking to offset the effect of the cheese.
What’s the problem with sheep’s milk cheese?
How come I can never find it? Goat’s cheese milk is all over the place. I tasted water buffalo milk cheese recently, but I didn’t enjoy the experience. I have seen water buffalo standing shoulder deep in the rice fields in China and Thailand and the sight is not a pretty one. I’m sticking to sheep’s milk cheese and in fact at this very moment I am unwrapping yet another slab of Gorgonzola that’s full of that nice green mold and pulling the cork on another bottle of red wine. Wanna share?
Sheep’s cheese and a nice Chianti…Hello, Clarice. Sheep’s cheese and goat cheeses are historically older than cow’s cheese – they were domesticated first. (And anyone who doesn’t like a good Feta is without character.) Perhaps one of the finest of Western cuisine traditions that we retain from the Ancient world, the making of cheese, even if it is darn hard to find the really good stuff, and for the most part the heavily processed stuff is what we get to deal with. Lamentable really.
Sheep and goat cheeses (plus milk) are better for your health and skin. Studies have proven that 2% cow’s milk was what a lot of multiple sclerosis patients collectively drank for years before being diagnosed.
Until the next post, much love, peace, and medicated hair grease.
- Thierry