Only prudence and the presence of the chef is preventing me from attacking the round cheese board peppered with assorted crackers, apricots and sun-dried tomatoes that’s sitting between us. None of the little blocks of cheese on the board is anything like the processed cheese that I have grown up on or the emulsified cheesespreads that has been slopping about on my breakfast bread for years. “Eating processed cheese is like licking rubber,” says the chef and as I am still reeling from the salty, pungent aroma of goat’s cheese that’s doing a little jig behind my tongue, I have no cause to disagree.
Nor do Bangalore’s gourmets who have (finally) a wide variety of cheese to choose from. In fact, today, it is possible to find more than 150 varieties of cheese right here — everything from blue-veined Stiltons and Roqueforts to the sweet and delicate Swiss Emmental to the soft mozzarella and Camembert and the wonderfully nutty Italian Parmesan — you name it and you will find it in the city’s gourmet stores and fairs such as Olive Beach’s Gourmet Bazaar. Cheese appreciation has been gaining ground in India, says Chef Manu but we still have to get out of the mould of munching supermarket cheese slices.
“Cheese is a fascinating subject. The French themselves have nearly 1,000 different cheeses...there is creamy cheese, smoky cheese, hold-your-nose-and-eat-cheese..exploring the world of cheese is like exploring the world.” What the chef likes best is goat’s cheese because of its “earthy quality”. “Goat’s cheese gets its characteristics from what the goat eats and goats generally tend to eat everything!” The taste of cheese depends on a particular vegetation, soil, environment, milk and of course, what the milk-giving animal eats.
Which is why the French have the prestigious ‘AOC’ certification — ‘Appellation D’Origine Controlee’ which guarantees that the cheese originates from a specific region of France and has been produced in a traditional way.
Take the ‘king of cheese’ Roquefort, the celebrated and uber expensive blue cheese from France. (It costs Rs 450 per 100 gm at Olive Beach). Recipient of the first AOC certificate, Roquefort was originally ripened in the soil of natural caves of Mont Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Traditionally, cheesemakers extracted it by leaving bread in the caves for six to eight weeks until it was overtaken by the mold. The inner part of the bread was then dried to produce a powder. Incidentally, the largest producer of Roquefort cheese is ‘Societe des Caves de Roquefort’, which owns several caves in the region and opens its facilities to tourists once in a while!
Nowadays, says Chef Manu, the mold is produced in the lab and is added to the curd or introduced into the cheese through long sticks that keep poking it. This mold is responsible for Roquefort’s distinctive blue and its smoke n salt tanginess — which hits you like a wrestler’s blow, the second you bite into its crumbly texture. Precisely why I reach out for the cracker. This time, without the chef’s prompting!
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