Asiago cheese bagel--I had 1/4 of one of these at work yesterday, with a schmeer of salmon cream cheese (another prosaic cheese!), and oh lordy, was that good. Asiago, as presented on a bagel--and can I just say, hooray for the goyim, for giving us such wild variations on the Jewish round bread that would make my ancestors moan with agony, but make me moan with joy? Thanks.--is a complex cheese, presenting foretastes as well as aftertastes. I love a toasted cheese; there's something in the melting process that fundamentally changes it. That crisp burnt taste, mixed with the oils that have risen to the congealed crust of the cheesy bits. Oh yes!
Feta--What may have once been a ghettoized cheese, confined to cuisines of the eastern Mediterranean and occasionally haute cuisine francais, is now, I like to think, a red-blooded American cheese. At least you can reasonably presume that the average Joe or Josephine on the street knows what feta is, and has a fair idea of what to do with it. I like feta. Not all fetas--I deplore that creamy, not-briny-enough sheep's feta from France. It's just too rich. Give me the hard stuff, the kind you can use as a flavorful salt substitute on your salads. Finally, let me just proudly boast: With the assistance of the fabulously talented and truly echt AT, I have successfully made spanikopita and tyropita, and my co-cook can vouch for its excellence. Thank you.
Cheddar--Wanna know something funny? When I was a kid, probably until I was 15 or 16, the only kind of cheese I liked was cheddar. And it had to be orange cheddar, none of that fancy white cheddar. In fact, I distrusted all white cheeses, except of course cream cheese, which, c'mon everyone, isn't really a cheese, it's a *spread*! Like, duh! So anyway, it was only yellow cheese for me (sorry if I alternate yellow with orange; I still can't decide what color cheddar is). And it had to be sliced thinly. If my mom gave me ungainly hunks of cheddar for an afternoon snack, forget it! Fortunately we had one of those hand-held cheese slicers with the wire running across it. You could cut paper-thin slices of cheddar with that thing, which you had to eat quickly before the humid air made the edges curl and the cold cheese--for it had to be straight from the fridge, the chillier the better--attracted condensation. I liked melted cheddar too, but it had to be melted all the way--there was nothing more disgusting than that chunk of warmed, but still solid, cheddar in the middle of a soggy open-faced melted cheese sandwich. Ugh, I feel sick thinking about it now.
Needless to say, my tastes have changed, but because of my earlier preferences, I still tend to think of Cheddar as the Ur-Cheese, the Platonic ideal of the cheeseness of cheese, from which I instinctively compare all other caseiforms.
I should continue this, with a discussion of Mozzarella and maybe Parmesan, but various un-cheese-related tasks call me.
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