Posts Tagged ‘goat cheese’

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Saint Maure Cheese: A Must Have On Your Shopping List

Friday, February 4th, 2011

A lot of us are not familiar with Saint Maure Cheese. This is another top quality French cheese that was first made by a Loire Valley dairyman. Saint Maure de Touraine Cheese, commonly called as “Sainte Maure”, is a log shaped goat cheese from Touraine, France. It is said to have been created during the Arab invasions in the 8th and 9th centuries, when goat breeding was first introduced in the Touraine region. This soft French cheese has a distinctive complex flavor. What makes this cheese unique is that it is an aged goat milk cheese. We are familiar with fresh goat milk cheese that is soft and spreadable. However, most French would prefer this older type.

The aging comes with more complex flavor to this cheese. It has a walnut aroma and a slightly salty but nutty taste. It’s made from goat’s milk and is soft with a natural rind. The rind should be thin, smooth with blue-gray molding that is completely natural. The traditional Saint Maure cheese will be produced with a blade of straw or a wooden stick placed through the cheese log from end to end. It is moist and creamy in texture. It is pure white colored and if the rind is not ash coated, it will be tan in color that becomes increasingly darker colored as it ages.

Buying Saint Maure goat cheese will certainly bring creaminess in your delectable, mouth-watering dishes. You can eat it in plain, place it in sandwiches or you can perfectly add this to your mixed green salads. Make this as a cream to your fried-fish fillet or top it to your side dishes. You can also use this cylindrical ash colored French goat cheese to make delicious puffy pastry appetizers. Without doubt, this is one of the very best French cheeses available in the market today. Making this cheese part of your shopping list will definitely be a smart choice. If you can’t find at your local gourmet store, try finding a good cheese shop or check out at Ideal Cheese website, they have available best quality Saint Maure Cheese. You might also want try their cheese board selection of the month. There are so many superb cheeses like Saint Maure cheese; it’s just waiting to be tasted by you. So what are you waiting for, try one now and get the ultimate French goat cheese experience.

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Bucheron Cheese – The Perfect Cheese for a Wine and Cheese Party

Friday, September 24th, 2010

The options that you have when it comes to complementing the textures of French cheeses are simply unrelenting. Whether you have a semi-aged Bucheron cheese or a young Camembert, you will always a perfect pair for every French cheese.

People have been pairing wine and cheese for a very long time, perhaps as long as there has been wine and cheese. There is an incomprehensible relationship between the two – wine and cheese just well with each other. Although the clear origin of such practice has not been traced to date, it was believed that before, people simply served wines and cheeses, separately.

Perhaps the reason why wine and cheese go well together is the fact that they have a great deal in common – both are made through fermentation, and both may be consumed while fresh, simple, young, and even when they are aged and mature.

There are no firmly established rules that dictate which wines should be served with which particular types of cheeses. When setting up an exciting wine and cheese pairing, there is only one thing that you should remember – if it tastes good, it’s a pair!

Do not be fooled by those fancy gourmet chefs that you see on TV giving their two cents about what kind of cheese is perfect for this kind of wine, because at the end of the day, pairing wine and cheese is all about personal taste. However, even though everything boils down to personal taste, certain guidelines have been recommended favorable by a majority of wine and cheese pairing enthusiast. In order to have a successful wine and cheese party, you should know the basics such as:

White wines are best paired with soft cheeses and stronger flavors.

Red wines are best paired with hard cheeses and milder flavors.

Fruity and sweet (not dry) white wines and other desert wines work well with a wider range of cheeses.

The sharper cheese you choose, the sweeter your wine should be.

If you are still learning to pair cheese and wine, perhaps it is better that you start simple. It might be a safer choice to serve cheeses that go well with almost any kind of wine, like the Bucheron cheese.

Bucheron cheese is a very wine friendly cheese that goes well with a wide variety of whites and reds. You can serve chunks of Bucheron cheese with Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Cabernet. While some might consider Sauvignon as the ultimate pair for Bucheron cheese, all these wines are excellent.

The key to a successful wine and cheese party is harmony, which you can definitely achieve with Bucheron Cheese. So next time you invite your friends over, serve them Bucheron cheese with a bottle of wine today!

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Bucheron Cheese: The Unique Goat Cheese

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

There is an old saying that goes “age doesn’t matter, unless you’re a cheese”. Beyond its attempt to be funny, there is actually a certain truth behind such saying. Aging in cheese, sometimes called ripening, is the most important part in making cheese.

By letting the cheese to rest in carefully controlled conditions, they are able to develop the look, the texture, the flavor and even the aroma properties that make them unique. With aging, the bloom blossoms on Camembert, the holes magically turns into Swiss, and the veins burst through Gorgonzola.

As a cheese ripens, microbes and enzymes develop inside, breaking down the proteins and the milk fat into several complex combinations of amino acids, amines and fatty acids. In the end, these processes enrich the texture of the cheese as well as intensify its flavor.

In order to have their own unique characteristics, most cheeses are aged between the periods of two weeks to two or more years. In principle, the longer the cheese is aged, the firmer, sharper and more distinctive its taste and texture becomes.

Cheeses like the Stravecchio Parmigiano Reggiano for instance, are allowed to ripen for 24 to 36 months and thus its interesting nutty-fruity taste and its hard, gritty texture. The mildest cheeses such as ricotta, and cream and cottage, are eaten fresh right away and are not ripened at all.

However, some cheeses are ripened mid-range – often termed as semi-aged cheese – for about 5 to 10 weeks. And one of the best tasting semi-aged cheeses available in the market today is the Bucheron cheese.

Bucheron cheese is made from pure goat’s milk, originally a native of Loire Valley in France. Widely available and absolutely tasty, the Bucheron makes a perfect ingredient for a salad or sandwich. It has a soft, creamy center almost the same in texture to a typical chevre (goat’s cheese), but typical this cheese is not.

What makes Bucheron unique aside from its gooey and creamy taste is that it is made in short logs and aged before it is cut into much smaller rounds. Surrounding its creamy center is a ring of a much harder, tangier cheese that tickles your taste buds with a pretty sharpness and complexity that will surely out your typical chevre to shame.

Its interesting characteristic – the layer of gooey cheese around the large chalky core and a thin bloomy layer of mold similar to brie cheese – is due to its youth. Softly ripened cheeses age from the outside in, thus explaining its interesting center.

Thanks to the natural magic of mold, you get two cheeses in one block: a creamy, mushroomy center with a dry and clay-like and mildly tangy fresh goat milk cheese at the crust. Go ahead and try Bucheron cheese today! Pair it with Bordeaux’s or any dry whites and sink slowly into heaven.

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