Sweet Cheese, we love our cheese!

Please tell us what cheeses you love the most!

Very funny!
:o)

Saga Blue is one of my faves. It's a Brie, with a blue filling.

Heaven is full of cheese!!! Mine is, anyway. ;o)

My favorite, as of today, is Fourme d'Ambert. I am traveling to Vienna in February and plan to do some cheese "research" there!

Fourme d'Ambert from elegusto.co.uk/cheese

Known as the "connoisseur's blue cheese", Fourme d’Ambert is a capsule shaped cheese patched with grey/white moulds on a natural thin crust. Ambert is a town that faces west from the Mont du Forez and its joint AOC with sister cheese, Fourme du Montbrison, which faces east, was recently disolved in recognition of the importance of terroir in cheesemaking. As with Roquefort, the penicillin is first introduced into the raw cow’s milk. Air is then injected into the pâté once the cheese has been made in order to help it develop later in the maturation process. The interior is creamy coloured with liberal greenish blue marbling which doesn't dominate the flavour, this cheese being one of the mildest of French blues. The texture is rich and mellow with a subtle aroma of roasted nuts and a fruity flavour making it a perfect partner for fine wines as the taste is not overly aggressive.

Soft asiago, no doubt about it.

I also like hard asiago as well, but I find soft much better for general snacking.

#3 - that sounds rather tasty, I'll have to try to find some.

One of my favorites is Manchengo - drunken goat's cheese.

Curse you, pennylehmann! You're making me drool. I'll have to do some googling for Fourme d’Ambert. It doesn't look like something that will be too easy to find here in the states.

I'm a Manchengo hound too, radiantarchangelus.

Too be honest, about the only cheeses I don't care for are the processed one.

Anyone in here ever tried any cave-aged raw milk Gruyere cheese? It is divine.

I've had gruyere, but not that specifically.

We have this store outside of Cincy called Jungle Jim's. I think they have a website. Anyway, if you can imagine it, they have it, from ALL over the world. Their cheese aisle is simply not to be believed. Or the chocolate, coffee, honey, tea aisles. But the cheese aisle is divided by country and there are at least 25 countries represented with about 50ish offerings from each.

Well, I have tried many cheeses... but when you get right down to it, I like to snuggle up to plain old smoked cheddar. When done right, it is fantastic.

Yes, and I love a wonderfully made vanilla ice cream. Vanilla is an excellent flavor. There is a reason the very popular types got to be popular in the first place, I think. *blush*

Smoked Cheddar would be your comfort cheese, then.

I guess Havarti might be my current comfort cheese, preferably with Dill. :o)

Anything from the award-winning Cato Corner Farm in Connecticut, particularly their Hooligan or Wise Womanchego or Drunk Monk or their Black Ledge Blue.

All unpasteurized cows' milk cheeses made by a mother/son team and a whole bunch of happy cows (if this sounds like a shameless plug, it probably is, since I know the family, but the cheese has, in fact, been covered in New York Times, Gourmet, Town and Country, Saveur (Hooligan was noted as one of USA top 50 cheeses), television, radio, in several books on cheese, etc. ... represented USA as entry at Slow Food Festival in Italy, ... even in a Business Week article on Slow Food in the Fast Lane!).

I used to like Swedish Bund-Ost before I tasted this.

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Doogiewray! Good to see you! Okay, I'm going to click on the link.
*drool*
This place looks fantastic, but it's almost an hour away. It's possible to order online at another site. Maybe I'll do that.
:o)

Their cheese is sold at many other places and restaurants (usually too expensive for my wallet), but they are at the NYC Green Markets at Union Square, Grand Army Plaza (Brooklyn) and, uh, hmm... I forget right now ... another Green Market in Brooklyn (Fort Greene?) on Saturdays (not to mention Murray's and Saxelby's Cheese Mongers in NYC).

Or, just get in the car some Saturday morning and drive to Colchester (in a Lifetime of Cheese, an hour is only a few minutes - besides, it's sort of on the way to the Book Barn in Niantic) and tell them doogie sent you ... you'll be treated like a human (regardless as to whether you use the doogie-card or not) and you can sample all the cheeses to your hearts content.

You can pet the cows and the border collies and, if you ask, walk the 75 acres of meadows and wooded hills (with a waterfall (except in August)).

Enough, already, Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

(By the way, Clamairy ... are you "Cheese!")(Grin!)

pps: Jeezum Crow! We share 39 great books! Cool beans! I just remembered that you were the first to join my Nutmeggers Group. How's Life these days?

I am thinking about making that drive! Trust me.

No, I am not "Cheese." *grins back*

Life is good. I still haven't had a chance to read any Pynchon. But Vineland is on my TBR pile. I started it, and I was enjoying it, but Real Life (and three book clubs) intervened.

How's life treating you, doogiewray?

Sage Derby!

No, I'm not talking about a green hat. I'm talking about a cheese from the UK that I found at my local grocery store. It's just deliscious. :o)

Nope - she's not cheese. Cheese is a group-account. She's just the one who thought of the group in the first place. :D

Yeah, but I mentioned it as a joke! LOL I never expected anyone to actually create it. :o)

But look at what we've learned already. :D

New cheeses, a cheese place near you.

And why not merge your top two (non-familial) loves? ;)

Cheese and Wine?

Oh... heh heh... you mean Cheese and BOOKS. ;o)

I tried smoking cheddar once, but it just clogged my pipe.

(You know, i didn't know there really WAS a cheese group, I thought JPB was kidding...)

I posted this at The Green Dragon but then realised that it belongs here.

True story about my grandfather. He loved cheese as much as I do. He used to buy a whole Stilton cheese (he lived in the county were it is made). With the landlord's permission, he kept it in the beer cellar of his local pub. Stale beer dripped onto it from the leaking hand pumps above. Occasionally, rats nibbled it. He always claimed it was the best cheese he ever tasted.

BTW, the rats only nibbled which proves that rodents don't much like cheese. Well not beery blue cheese anyway.

Just thinking about Stilton is making me go all drooley...

I love just about all bleu cheeses. I think Gorgonzola is probably my favourite. The best dish I've ever had in any restaurant, anywhere, EVER, was penne in Gorgonzola cream sauce at the Augustus Cafe in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. It was heavenly; one of those cheese-eating experiences that one can happily replay over and over in one's mind.

mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!

darrow, you know, I wouldn't be afraid to try it!

xicanti, now you're making me drool!!!!

Call me unsophisticated, but I love plain old mozzarella string cheese. There's nothing more satisfying than pulling it string by painstaking string, and washing it down with BananaColada Fuze. Yum.

#21 mmmmmm.... Gorgonzola!

#21 Awww xicanti ... I wish I had known. I was in Las Vegas recently and I would definitely have tried that dish. Oh well, there will be a next time.

Sharp Cheddar w/a tart Granny Smith apple is a great snack when reading!

#25 - Yes, cheese and apples do go soooo well together. A good friend of mine once brought me a cheese and fruit plate that had, among other things, pineapple and Havarti together. What a fantastic combination! :o)

Pears and Extra-Sharp Vermont Cheddar! Yummmmmmmmm...

5> I don't know any wine-washed Manchegos. I love Manchego, though. And, besides, Manchego is made from sheep's milk.

Murcio al Vino is the famous Spanish Drunken Goat. And I love that, too.

At my restaurant, we use cave-aged Gruyere on our onion soup. But it's not raw milk. Pretty tough to source in the US and almost always prohibitively expensive.

Yummy, though.

I love just about every kind of veined cheese. Of course I love Stilton, Gorgonzola and Fourme d'Ambert (all already mentioned). But there are a few others that really light me up: Cabrales and Valdeon (both from Spain), Cashel Blue (an Irish Cheese), Blue Shropshire (from England - and the only veined cheese I know of that's yellow) and the disturbingly good blue from Montchevre in Wisconsin called "Chevre in Blue" - a fairly rare sheep's milk blue.

Have you ever had white (unveined) Stilton? What a wonderful breakfast cheese with fruit! OMG!! :)

A wonderful thing to do to Cabrales is to mash half a pound or so with a couple of tablespoons of Cognac and leave it to mature for a day or more. Serve it on crusty slices of baguette. Heavens!

Welcome, mcglothlen!
:o)

Cheese - I love cheese - it's the food of the gods! It's impossible to pick a favourite. This weekend I have been snacking on Taleggio and Torta di Gorganzola. I really like two English cheese from Yorkshire - Cotherstone and King Richard III Wensleydale. I know wensleydale is pretty well known but Richard III is an artisan cheese made on a small farm - as is Cotherstone. Blue Wensleydale is also great and, as with Stilton, is the way the cheese ought to be eaten. In both these cases the white cheeses are young and immature and in the past would not have been eaten. Stilton is wonderful but variable in quality. In my opinion Colston Bassett stilton is the best. I could go on and on but will stop now. (For three years I owned a deli which explains some of my obsession!)

32> Actually, Blue Stiltons are sold as young as 9 weeks old. White Stiltons are a bit younger but the significant bit is that they are Stiltons to which Penicillium roqueforti have not been introduced.

Colston Bassett makes a lovely White Stilton.

Sorry - you're right both cheeses are eaten when white but they are more prized when they are blue and, personally, I would still maintain is how they should be eaten however I know that a lot of people don't like blue cheese.

34> "I know that a lot of people don't like blue cheese"

Ohhhhh... don't get me wrong! :) I find Stilton (the real thing, the blue thing) to be toe-curlingly wonderful. I just think there's nothing wrong with MORE cheese. MORE cheese, rather than less. In other words, I want both kinds! I'm greeeeeeedy.

I am eating Colston Basset Stilton as I type. It's dangerously good... (I only meant to have a corner and I'm almost a third of the way through the piece)