Great Cooks Radio

The other day, a woman walks into a grocery store and she meets this man named Mr. Fromage. Overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and aromas around her, Mr. Fromage helps her find her whey.

Read the full interview

Jill
Hello this is Jill from Simpledailyrecipes.com. How are you doing? I
have got to share with you my expeirence I had the other day at the
grocery store. I know, it wasn’t just any old grocery store though,
it was one of those foody grocery stores that’s got everything from
all over the world. Well I’d never been in this one before and I found
myself standing in their cheese section. And I’ve never seen so much
cheese in all my life, I was completely overwhelmed. I didn’t know
which way to turn, right or left or go forward.

And this man came up to me.

Now I can’t tell you his real name so I’m gonna call him Mr. Fromage.
And Mr. Fromage asked if he could help me and I said, “Well yes.”
So we got to chatting about cheese and I asked him his top 5 favorite
cheeses. And boy the information that fell out of this guy’s mouth
was fantastic, and my girlfriend Kim nudges me in the side and she says,
“It’s too bad we’re not recording all this.” And I thought,
oh well we can. So I did. So listen in, I asked Mr. Fromage where do
I start. Where do I even get started here.

I wanted to know, I went into
a grocery store and I’m in front of all these cheeses from all over
the world. What am I going to buy first? How do I even know what I should
get, what’s good, what goes on the basic cheese board maybe?

Mr. Fromage
On the basic cheese board you would want something, your texture is
important, color is important, flavor is important, and you’re gonna
want to try to please people who have different tastes. You need to
please the people who are afraid of cheese or who are not very educated
about cheese and then people who like the stronger, the stinkier. People
who have traveled and like things that are unusual or just the adventurous.
I would always choose for color, so I would choose maybe something yellow
or something colored in another way. I would choose probably a goat
cheese because there’s some people who do not do cow’s milk. I would
do a hard cheese such as a cheese that’s hard in the way that parmesan
is hard, but I probably wouldn’t choose parmesan. I might choose piave
because it has a finer texture.

I would choose something very
soft in the way that havarti cheese is soft but to have a more gourmet
feel to it I would choose something like doux de montagne because it
is soft in that way but has a pretty round rine, so again we’re going
with color. It’s okay I think on the cheese board to have cheeses
that have things included in them like chai or truffle. We just tried
the fotogenetic that has the truffle in the cheese, and very very interesting
cheese additions that we can do to cheeses.

I would always choose something
like a bree. Something that is very very soft and unctuous at room temperature
that runs, that’s spreadable, very buttery. Delice bourgogne, or brillat
savarin are two very famous ones. And finally I would choose a blue
cheese like a roquefort or santamour which is a cow’s milk that’s
roquefort style or one of the basque cheeses which have a very very
old old history. They’re shep’s milk, but the sheep milk’s blue
so you get that raw milk flavor and very very strong blue flavor. That’s
what I would put on my cheese board, I would start with a bree, a blue,
a soft, a hard, and make sure I have some color in there. And that’s
the cheese board.

Jill
Now you said room temperature. You’re not talking Texas room temperature,
what temperature are we really saying?

Mr. Fromage
Yes I’m not talking front porch temperature because everyone on my
front porch it’s about 91 degrees in the shade. Room temperature,
68, 70 degrees. A morning outside or evening outside it’s gonna be
okay for several hours. You have to watch with things that are runny
like bree is runny because it doesn’t really hurt the flavor much
but it is really not appetizing to have it running all over the place.
But the cold, if you have cold cheese it dulls your palette, the cold
dulls your palette, as does the high altitude. So you’re gonna need
to make sure it’s room temperature so that you’re not cheating
yourself out of the flavor of the cheese.

Jill
What are the common fruits, what’s best fruits to put on a cheese
board? Would you do crackers, would you do bread?

Mr. Fromage
It would depend on the cheese. I always like to do a bread. If I’m
doing something unctious and soft like savaran or some kind of stinky
French soft cheese I would do like a bread stick, or a sliced bagette
I usually always include or a plain water cracker. I don’t want a
cracker that has a bunch of other junk on it because it interferes with
the taste of the cheese and I’m kind of a purist, I want to taste
the cheese, that’s why I bought it.

As far as fruit is concerned,
typical things that are eaten with cheddars and the harder cheeses would
be apples, grapes. The sheep cheeses are famously eaten with black cherry
confi and mimbreo, which is quintse paste. If you’ve ever had manchego
cheese, typically it’s gonna be served with quintse paste or mimbreo.
And then any kind of fig spread or apricot spread is going to go with
a variety of cheeses, and things like bree you can treat in a sweet
or a savory way. You could do like basil pesto on top of bree or you
could do something very modern like a fusion of raspberry and chipotle
on top of bree to please a bigger variety of your guests.

Jill
Last question. Is there a big difference between sheep cheese and goat
cheese?

Mr. Fromage
There is a difference between sheep and goat cheese. The description,
you can’t say good or better. The description would I think best be
summed up by saying goat cheese has a tanginess and a tartness to it
that is not present, it’s gonna be more absent in the sheep cheese.
Sheep cheese has a mellower, I would say rounder flavor, whereas the
goat is gonna have a real tang to it. It also depends on the treatment
of the cheese. If it’s whipped or if it has a lot of butter fat in
it because nubian goat milk has high butter fat content whereas sonin,
not so much. So it’s not gonna be as butter. Tackarina Romana cheese
has a sharpness to it, but that’s from the aging process, you get
all those calcium lactate crystals that form during the aging process
so that’s where the sharpness comes from.

Jill
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

Mr. Fromage
You’re very welcome.

Jill
You have educated me wonderfully. This is Jill from Simpledailyrecipes.com,
and I appreciate you listening.