Day 3: How to Serve Saint Agur

When I told my friend the Blue Cheese Brit that I was planning to eat blue cheese for a month, he snickered. The Brit, a frequent face on this blog, works in a medical lab by day and returns to his own personal cheese cave by night. He is an airy dairy vampire.

The Brit will tell you, in his Scottish accent, that there is a regular rotation at his house in Philadelphia – meaning, he rotates blue cheeses in and out of his diet depending on the season and his whim.

“This winter, I’ve been on a weekly diet of Saint Agur and Cremifacto,” he told me, as he muddled through Di Bruno’s wrappers in his fridge. “I can’t imagine living without them. They are sooooo creamy.”

He wanted me to tell you that if you are considering a blue cheese vocation you “simply must” spend an evening with Saint Agur. He recommends a weekly wedge, administered with dried cranberries and walnuts.

Saint Agur is a cow's milk double-crème blue (60 percent butterfat) with a gentle boldness. In wine terms, it’s a Pinot – not hardy like a Cabernet or simple like a Beaujolais, but pleasantly frisky.

Roquefort, France’s premier blue, is headstrong and salty – too much for some. Saint Agur is much lighter on the salt but still an excellent cheese, the kind of cheese you could eat every night after work.

And serve to cheese aficionados.

How to Serve Blue Cheese

If you’re hosting a blue cheese party, here are a few little tricks I learned from the Blue Cheese Brit. He is such a wonder – a master host who can appear relaxed even when he has a crown roast and several fowl in the oven. One day, I aspire to be his equal.

1.    Always serve your cheese at room temperature. That’s when flavors will be most potent. Just leave cheese on the counter for an hour while you pish-posh about the house before guests arrive.

2.   Keep a decent sherry in your cupboard, along with a ready supply of dried fruit and nuts. If bezzie mates pop in, you can create an instant buffet.

3.   Blue cheese goes well with baguette and oaty biscuits. Freeze leftover baguette rounds, then you can toast them up in a flash.

4.   When you taste cheese, smell it first. With blues, you may detect a flinty scent, vegetal hints, or a leathery aroma. Say, “Gorgeous.” Then drop a crumb on your tongue. Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth as you eat. Then, you’ll taste the full range of flavors.

5.    Flavorful cheeses often have lots of notes that are fun to distinguish. In blues, look for hints of: grape, white chocolate, flint, watercress, earth, cream, black pepper, salt, roasted nuts, leather.

6.   Common blue cheese pairings: sliced pear, walnuts, figs (fresh or dried), chutney, candied pecans – anything sweet, even mango.

7.   In the glass: stout, barley wine, Sauternes, port, sherry.

8.   Serve blue cheese after a meal, not before. It’s heavy and salty, a nice finisher, while lighter cheeses – particularly goat or bloomy styles– go well before, alongside beer or bubbly.

Époisses: Tiger of the Cheese World

I can still remember the first time I tried Époisses – it was at a party three years ago, and when it appeared on the table a hush fell over the kitchen. “Who brought the Époisses?” someone whispered. It was as if a tiger had entered the room.

In the cheese world, Époisses is a big cat. As one cheesemonger told me recently, “If I had to pick a favorite French cheese, it would be Époisses. It’s good at any age.”

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Full Disclosure: This post is part of a weekly series I write for Di Bruno Bros., one of my fave cheese haunts in Philly. I choose the topics, but I get paid to guest-blog on the store's site.

Chabrin: Today's Lunch

Yes, this really was my lunch. I had the day to work at home and I was photographing cheeses – pudgy, stinky things – when I remembered that I had a hunk of this gorgeously nutty French goat cheese in the fridge, left over from a department party.

I also had a pile of fruit and veg on the counter, so I decided to forage for a perfect combination. A little crusty bread, some grapes, a mellow breakfast radish. When I ate this little plate, I thought, “Why do I ever eat anything else?”

There is no better lunch than a hunk of bread, a wedge of cheese, and something sweet and crispy on the side.

Chabrin is a perfect lunch cheese – it is mild without being inert. (So many “mellow cheeses” get lost on me; I want to like them, but they are like so many of the people I knew in high school – no personality.) I love a cheese that can wear bangles. Chabrin can wear bangles; she can wear big fake eyelashes. This is a goat cheese with razzmatazz.

The texture is exquisite – smooth and not at all gummy (or gamey) the way aged goat cheeses can be. The flavor is all hazelnut and toffee. Chabrin calls to mind salt caramel. Smooth, pleasantly salty, creamy.

Chabrin comes from the French Pyrenees, the same region that produces Ossau Iraty. I bought this wedge at Downtown Cheese in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, where, sadly, the monger couldn't tell me much about it -- although he consulted his Cheese Primer.

If cheeses were CDs, this would be on heavy rotation. Chabrin -- she is my new BFF.

Chabrin, posing for pics at a Jesuit function

Mimolette: The Great Pumpkin of Cheese

At Di Bruno Bros, Zeke Ferguson with Mimolette

I’ve on been on an orange cheese kick this month – I’ll take my autumn where I can. I like the sunny color, I admit, and with Halloween around the corner, I’m hunting for that perfect cheese to nibble on the stoop while the ghouls of the neighborhood troll for candy. Let them have their Milky Way, I want my Mimolette.

Mimolette comes in a nubby, spherical wheel, and when you cut it in half, it often reveals facial markings. Kidding. Cheesemonger Zeke Ferguson did the honors on this one, while we discussed his cheese-related tattoos.

Zeke Ferguson shows some leg

Carve it, and serve it, I say. Mimolette, that is. At 6 months, this cheese is mild and sweet with a toasty finish. Try it with Tamari-roasted pumpkin seeds and a nut brown ale or a Belgian Saison. If you come across some aged Mimolette with intense butterscotch notes, pour some Calvados, then stoke a fire and lay out the sheepskin rugs.

Mimolette is a French cheese from Normandy with roots in the Netherlands, where Gouda and Edam are produced. The tangerine hue comes from Annatto, a plant dye that is also used to color Sparkenhoe Red Leicester. The slightly peppery taste of Annatto gives Mimolette a hint of smokiness – think of paprika. You can taste a little fire, but there’s nothing sharp or spicy. Even your trick-or-treaters could learn to like it.

Here it is, unadorned, with some apples. Also nice. This is a good cheese for those with a delicate palate. Personally, I like a cheese that's more stubborn. But then, I am trying, I really am, to recognize those subtle notes, to love the un-ghoulish ones. And mild'n smoky Mimolette is a good place to start.

Époisses

The star cheese of our Thanksgiving plate was a little French wheel washed in brandy. I’d read about it in The Cheese Primer, in Murray’s Cheese Handbook, and in a book on pairings by Janet Fletcher, Cheese and Wine. Here was an old monastery cheese that was rumored to taste like meat and garlic, an Old World stinker perfected by monks. Époisses is also rumored to be banned from French trains due to its smell.

So, I expected a real whiff-burger, but my wheel of Epoisses did not stink up the fridge. And it did not offend our brazen band of dinner guests, who spent a whole afternoon eating and drinking around the cheese board while Monseiur Fromage prepared his time-consuming “Turkey in a Shroud.” The real key, though, was pairing this cheese with a great wine. Wow, the white Burgundy that several Internetters recommended brought flavors out of this cheese that were absolutely novel to witness. Rarely have I enjoyed such an optimal pairing.

We drove to New Jersey to find a bottle of 2008 Joseph Drouhin Saint-Véran (about $15). Cooled it on the back stoop, brought the cheese to room temperature, and let our couch-clan of tasters descend. The response was YouTube-able; a sip of wine after a nibble of Epoisses had everyone’s eyebrows on the ceiling. “Oh my god,” exclaimed our Blue Cheese Brit, who had just arrived with a bag of delicious patés and cheeses under his arm.

With all the hype, Époisses may sound scary. I found it surprisingly tame but perfectly balanced. It’s a bit whiffy, but only when you take it out of its round package – the fragrance calls to mind onions, mushrooms, a damp carpet of leaves. The taste, however, is wicked; think of a brandy-spiked venison pate, then add a velvetine mouthfeel, and give it a tangy orange rind.

Wine-and-cheese guru Janet Fletcher recommends serving Époisses with a Riesling or a Dry Pinot Gris, while others suggest a Cab. Frankly, I would never serve it without the Saint Véran white burgundy we enjoyed over Thanksgiving. It was truly…it sounds canned, I know…but I mean it: astonishing.

Other highlights from our Thanksgiving cheeseboard:

Keen’s Cheddar: a flawless raw-milk farmhouse cheddar that our friend, the Blue Cheese Brit, calls his old steady. He says it’s “a must” in any gentleman’s crisper.

Forsterkase: A bacony-flavored, washed-rind, raw-milk cheese from Switzerland that is cured in spruce bark. Yes, bacony! This is a fantastically heady and bizarre cheese that calls to mind hunting lodges and men wearing wineskins into the woods. The rind looks like a dirty hiking boot but is whack-delicious in a herdsman kind of way.

Yes, yes, that is the famed "Turkey in a Shroud." There's our bird after two days of marinating in a mustard rub. The cheesecloth shroud was draped over her at half past twelve, and she was basted every quarter hour, which meant that she wasn't ready until almost 7:30 p.m. Was she a fine bird, our little Nefertiti? Oh, she was.