Cheese! - John C. Kirk

10:45 pm - Cheese!

When I was in the supermarket last month, I came across some half-price cheese (presumably left over from Christmas), each one sold as a "truckle". I like cheese, and that's a funny name, so I bought a couple; I realised later that it had reminded me of "bowtruckles" (magical creatures in the Harry Potter books). Anyway, these truckles are squat cylindrical blocks of cheese, covered in wax, so they look a bit like tyres. The ones I bought were only 100g, but I gather you can get bigger ones. The main challenge I had was trying to figure out how to open them! The approach I used was to slice off a small piece (a "chord" as seen from above), then peel the rest of the wax away, which came off fairly easily. Anyway, they're interesting as a novelty item, and I haven't come across "Wensleydale with Pineapple" before, but I couldn't taste any difference compared to the normal packaging methods.

More recently, a colleague at work approached me: she knew that I liked cheese, and she'd just bought some Stinking Bishop (as featured in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit but it turned out that the smell was just too overpowering. Fortunately, that's not a problem for me, since the smell is irrelevant. I normally tend towards bland food (e.g. I don't like curries), but I do like strong flavours in cheese, so I was happy to take it off her hands. I've tried a small piece, which was nice, and I'm now leaving it out of the fridge for two hours as recommended. As with the truckles, the name amuses me; since the cheese is named after the perry it's soaked in, you may be able to buy it at a real ale festival.

Man cannot live on cheese alone, but it's certainly tempting to try...