Sure. They start off all smooth and gentle, but then they start hanging out with a rough crowd - that spoiled brat Milk, or the tough guy Jerky - and next thing you know they’re knocking over Orange Juice bottles or going into egg cartons and beating the poor things till they crack up.
May be worth noting that cheese originated as an answer to the question “How do we preserve milk in such a way that it’s good to eat months or even years from now?”
I nominate QtM as host of the first annual Straight Dope cheese party. Mangetout needs to be there as well.
I’ll bring the wine.
Tibetans have a range of cheeses (Tibet neighbors Mongolia). Most yak but some goat cheeses.
Some are kinda like big chunks of cottage cheese that are dried out and hard as a rock. Keeps forever in the high elevation environment. Just plop them in your yak butter tea for a while to soften and then chew with your ground roasted barley. Tasty.
I’ve had some fresh mozzarella type yak cheese that was really good.
Finally, a soft goat cheese (chevre) only once in a monastery set in a cave on a cliff face a long hike out of the village. Man, was that tasty. I would give a lot to recreate that one. And the barley flat breads were divine. Also some fresh yak butter for the bread. Oh man, making me drool at the 30 year old memory it was that good.
Something to note is that mold/fungus is not just the part that you can see. It has hyphae (“roots”) that infiltrate the inside of the cheese. Hard cheese is much less likely to be full of the fungus. Either way, what you’re eating may or may not contain fungus, and may or may not be harmful or something to worry about.
:dubious:
28 and 40-year old cheeses: http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2012/10/08/the-oldest-edible-cheese-in-the-world
Welll…not today. Exactly. But it sorta used to be. In a sense.
Basically modern Mongolia is just a tiny northern fragment of previous Mongolias. Inner and Upper Mongolia ( which borders on Tibet ) are now part of China, as is Dzungaria ( Western Mongolia ). Modern Mongolia represents a rump of the old region of Outer Mongolia.
they both were far bigger.
Yup, that’s where my 28 year old (now aged 30) cheddar came from.
There’s mold and there’s mold. Over 70 species of Penicillium alone. You pay a lot more for Roquefort, for example, than for moldy cream cheese, and a lot more than that for the fermented juice of moldy grapes.
*Fundamentals of Cheese Science *(partially searchable here) looks good.
I don’t think an injection of Penicillium roqueforti would cure the clap. Nor Penicillium camamberti. (Overview from EPA on safety and taxonomy of mold in cheese here from US EPA. Different version, seems more hardcore [heh] here.)
A friend of mine once gave me a big brick.of pepper jack cheese, a favorite of mine…in June. I enjoyed the cheese, but I couldn’t eat it fast enough before it went bad. Totally inedible.
I assume you’re not considering Tibet province, correct? The traditional Tibet of less than 70 years ago includes what is now the Province of Tibet, Qinghai, big chunks of Northern and Western Sichuan, Gansu, Yunnan and possibly a bit of Xinjiang. Today Qinghai (which is Tibetan for all intents and purposes) borders Gansu and is only about 50 miles to Inner Mongolia. There have been Tibetans and Mongolians living as contiguous neighbors of some sort for most of recorded history. I didn’t actually do that route but I’m 99% sure you can find ethnic Tibetans and Mongolians as contiguous neighbors today.
That’s a relief. You wouldn’t want to have to shoot someone. What a senseless waste of human life.