I’d been hearing from a few people from work about all the great cheeses they have at the local farm store, the one I pass going to work every day. Being a typical American, I don’t know a lot about cheese so I ignored the place. Yesterday I stopped in and randomly chose 4 cheeses. More like pointing in the general direction of a pile of cheese and taking what she picked up. Three were good as snacks.* The exception is swaledale goat’s milk cheese. Yuck. So I ask the cheese experts on the board, is it the goat that makes it taste “off”** or is that how the swaledale tastes?
Since I have your ears, how am I supposed to store them? Frankly, they’re stinking up the fridge. If you have any suggestions about the best ways to enjoy cheese, please don’t hesitate sharing. Save me from Velveeta!
Barbers 1833 vintage reserve cheddar, red devil (cheddar with jalapeno), and wensleydale reserve.
** I hope it’s not the goat because they’re just so cute. Coincidentally today I’ve been editing pictures from a recent zoo visit and saw the goat shots. How could anyone not like them, especially the baby goats. Cuter than a bug.
I’m no expert on goat cheese, but it comes in quite a few varieties, just like cow’s milk cheese.
I’ve had chevre, feta, cheddar, and gjetost, all made from goat’s milk, and they are as different from each other as cow’s milk blue cheese is different from cow’s milk colby.
I can’t comment on swaledale specifically, as I’ve not tried it, but the above 4 were pretty yummy.
Thanks QtM. I noticed at this shop the some cheese was available in both goat and cow. I didn’t know that was an option, nor what the difference in flavor could be. I’ll just have to buckle down and do a comparison. Damn, I was so unprepared. So many cheeses, so many names I’ve never heard of.
In my experience, goat cheese is always going to have a bit of an earthy funk to it, particularly soft fresh goat cheeses. Cypress Grove makes a hard goat cheese that’s very, very mildly funky called Midnight Moon that might be worth trying just to help you pinpoint what the goaty flavor is like.
Drain BeadWhaaa? I guess hard. I cut it into slices, not spreading it like butter.
Ace309, I’ll look for Midnight Moon. Should I try a soft goat cheese, I know not to buy a whole kilo!
Thanks all for all your help and please don’t hesitate to tell me your favorites and how you enjoy them. All I did was slice the cheese then plop it on wheat crackers.
IME goat’s cheese always has a bit of a “tang” at the back of the palate, more so than normal cow’s milk cheese. To me it always tastes a bit sour, as well. Which is why I like it.
The nicest lunch I ever had was a piece of imported chevre and some fresh bread from the bakery next door. Spread the goat cheese on the warm bread and consume.
Try a different approach with goat cheese…eat it in a salad with contrasting flavors. get some decent Feta and combine it with spring greens, some type of dried fruit (I like using cranberries for this purpose, the sweetness of which will offset the tangy nature of the cheese), some tomatoes and some type of crunchy ingredient, like your favorite nuts (walnuts and pecans work pretty well).
If I’m eating goat cheese out of hand, I usually buy the small logs that are softer, and a lot of them are herb or pepper infused. I love me some goat cheese.
Oh, and another thing: if you’re just getting into good cheeses, you owe it to yourself to try gruyere cheese. It’s a very good compromise cheese in terms of it’s approachability, but it has great flavor and versatility.
Here’s what I do with gruyere as a snack:
I slice the wedge of cheese into small rectangles, place them on good crackers (I actually like garlic melba toasts), squirt some grey poupon on them and then top it off with a smoked oyster.
I’ll second Midnight Moon (from Cypress Grove in California), and suggest their Purple Haze with lavender and fennel, or their Humboldt Fog. They have quite a few others.
You could also try a goat brie; I like Florette, but others prefer La Cabrie.
And of course there are hundreds of cheeses to try, made of cow’s milk, goat, sheep, water buffalo, and who knows what else.
Here are a couple of general cheese links off the top of my head to start with:
Feta is good. It can be an acquired taste, but I like the sharpness of the feta I’ve had. Good with spinach of course. At the cafe where I’m a baker I’ve done a spinach-feta quiche, that a lot of folks like.
Gjetost is also good. It’s Norwegian I think, a dark golden color, firm, can slice easily. It’s got a slightly sweet taste, and with the color reminds one of caramel.
Yup. Gjetost translated directly to “Goat cheese” in Norwegian. It’s somewhat sweet, but quite sharp and a brown caramel colour. It retains flavour very, very well and makes for excellent self-packed lunches. It also goes very, very well on crackers of every kind or on toasted or recently fried bread. Some also like to eat it with jam (strawberry) on top, but I find that idea repulsive.
ETA: As for storing, I keep my cheeses in an airtight plastic wrap, inside a tupperware container. The smell can be quite polluting, particularly if you’re storing several different kinds of cheeses.
Wow! Thanks for the recommendations. Now I’ve got ideas for the next trip to the farm store. Lots of ideas. As soon as I hit “Post,” I’m dropping the cheese into plastic bags.
The reason I asked was because most goat cheeses have a tangy, sour taste to them, which might have been a bit drastic if you weren’t expecting it, especially in a cheese that probably looked more like a mozzarella than anything else.
Some people don’t like goat cheese at all–I am one of the ones who can’t get enough of it. My favorite goat cheese is chevre, which is soft and spreadable. It might be easier for you to get used to the flavor of goat cheese when you’re eating something that reminds you of cream cheese, which is also a bit tangy. Chevre also melts really nicely–I love it in omelets with tarragon and dill and smoked salmon.
I forgot to ask about the outside of the cheese. One was covered in red wax. Do I leave it on the hunk o cheese and slice it along with the cheese when I use it or can I just pull it off all at once when I get home and let that be that? One of the other cheeses was covered in mold. At least that’s what the sign said. I cut off the outside and didn’t eat it. Is that right? Why don’t these things come with instructions, dammit?
Our local growers market (think they are Farmers Markets in the US?) has the best lemon pepper chevre.
Chevre freezes really well. Try it lightly toasted on sourdough, with some olives and cornichons on the side.
You are never short of a good lunch if you have bread and some chevre in the freezer.
If it’s hard wax, generally it isn’t edible. We leave the wax on and just remove it from the pieces we cut off to eat. I have no idea if removing it all at once will affect the taste or not.
As for the mold… you’re supposed to eat it! In most cases, it is the mold that gives the flavour to the cheese. The blue in blue cheese is mold. The white rind on brie and camembert is mold. It’s all very edible, and very good (well, I’m not a fan of blue, but that’s because of the taste, not because of the blue mold!)
I love goat cheese as well. It is fantastic as is or on a slice of french bread, or on apple slices, or in salads, or melted on a steak, or on a pizza, or crumbled into pasta or whatever else you choose to do with it.
When we want to try new cheeses, we usually do a wine and cheese; buy a bottle or two of wine, put the cheeses out with bread and apples and grapes and walnuts, and eat that as a meal. Very yummy.
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