Saturday, June 25, 2011

Do Androids Dream of Eclectic Cheese?


In light of recent, shall we say, “disappointments” in the blue cheese arena*, I have hunted down a blue that I’m happy to say is multo-delish.

Yes, I’ve discovered the Simon Johnson store (with its gourmet cheese room) is a short walk from my work. Yes, I often leave work with the kind of hunger-crazies that cause me to make rash decisions. And yes, when I’m in a cheese room, I experience a kind of mild excitement-stroke that results in leaving with much cheese.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Just like on my previous trip to Si-Jo’s, I asked the lovely cheese attendant to offer advice on a blue, and she recommended the Bleu de Lacqueuille.

It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely. And seriously, the makers must have had a field day buying vowels. 

Ms. Si-Jo (I know, I really should have made a note of her name) conceded the cheese was a little salty on the palate, but that it did not have the cloying aftertastes of many blues, thus making it perfect for pre-dinner nibbling.

Or pre-dinner “horfing down the gullet like a cheese-starved albatross” – as was the case with me. But don’t worry, I totes savoured it!

The thing I loved most about this cheese was the fact that it not only offered a complexity of flavour but also, within the actual slice taken from the wheel, there were different notes in different sections.

Creamy in parts, with sharp bites along the tantalising fault-lines of mould, this cheese reached its apogee along the crusty edges. It was as though I’d travelled forward in time, and the cheese had aged a few years into something one might find hidden in the darkened cloisters of a French monastery.

And so, in this delightful time-travelled induced coma of mine, I urge you try Bleu de Lacqueuille. From my nightmarishly dystopic vision of the future, I may even send someone back to tell you to try it, and you, like the John Connor that you are, will take heed lest you melt into a molten pool of cheese.

At least that’s what I think that movie was about. I don’t know – I’m too busy blissing out on Bleu.

---

* In the vein of the post-apocalyptic mood I seem to have conjured in my writing, I like to think that the Blue Cheese Arena is a cross between Rollerball, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Pride and Prejudice – where cheese lovers fight it out in a death cage to see who most recently acquired a wheel of delightful Stilton from Netherfield.

2 comments:

  1. Beautiful. Today I discovered a cheese shop in Haberfield and I know how to get there now. Let's go there and eat cheese.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Done. You know i'd travel not only to the inner west, but indeed the edges of the earth, if it involved eating cheese.

    ReplyDelete