The Smellier, The Better!

Of course, I’m talking about blue cheese!

Photo By Myrabella from WikiMedia

The wonderful thing about cheese is that it may look like a big wheel or a yellowish-white lump of milk solids, but it is actually a living breathing entity. From the minute it leaves the udder of the milk-producing animal, until the time it is digested in your gut, it is constantly evolving. Cheese is essentially a milky colony of marvelous microbes.

These teeth-sinkable pieces of cheese are home to friendly microbes

My modest cheese platter

Some of the best visual evidence of this is blue cheese, with sinuous veins of blue-green Penicillium mold running through it.

The mold gives it a distinctly pungent and salty flavour, which often puts people off on their first try. But many (including yours truly) soon begin to love this cheese!

One of the pioneering artisan cheese gurus of India, Mukund Naidu, has said that his first encounter with the blue cheese Roquefort was what made him decide to make cheese for the rest of his life!

Mukund Naidu and his cheeses (Pic Sandesh Ravikumar, Cheesemaking.com/Food Lovers magazine)

“I was horrified, as in India anything with mold and fungus is thrown into the garbage bin and here I was being asked to actually eat it... When I gave in and finally tasted the cheese, mold and all, I was astounded by the taste, the flavors. And I thought, wow, if this is cheese then this is what I need to make for the rest of my life.”, he said in an interview.

The ever-evolving nature of these microbes, blue or otherwise, is a point of fascination for many cheese makers (and bread-bakers and brewers!).

Another artisan cheese maker, Aditya Raghavan, has been experimenting with the characteristics of the blue mold in a different milk product – ghee! Can’t wait to taste some of that!

From Aditya Raghavan's Instagram page

The reason I'm suddenly this excited about blue cheese right now is because this Wednesday in the BHM restaurant, Palette, we will be serving a blue cheese soufflé as part of our French lunch menu. Photos, verdict (and perhaps recipe!) coming up on Wednesday. Stay tuned!