We have a slice of this pale yellow cheese. It’s got a dark brown rind, and is pitted with large holes; it looks like a classic comicbook wedge of cheese.

It has a crumbly, almost bready, texture. Initially, it’s very sweet, but turns fizzy and sour after a couple of moments, with a hint of green bitterness. It tastes nutty and rich, and there are sweet fudge notes underlying the sharp sour taste. The rind’s not so interesting; I think it’s chewy and tasteless. (Sidney the dog disagrees and scoffs the scraps, but she happily eats plastic and I think her judgement is suspect.)

The huge holes are fuzzed with little crunchy white grains, and are (I’m struggling to find a polite way to say this, I’m afraid) just the right size for me to stick my tongue inside them and lick them out. I’m rewarded with bright fruity pineapple flavours.

Co-cheese-scoffers P and K both think that tangy sour lemon is the dominant flavour in this cheese. I think it’s something sweeter – apples and pineapples.

A raw-milk goats cheese from Somerset, bought from Neals Yard Dairy

This is a little pyramid of goaty goodness, covered in a fuzzy white mould and with a layer of dark grey-green ash peeking out from underneath it. Inside the cheese is soft, and white, turning liquid underneath the rind. This is fresh new-season SPRING goat cheese and this means BABY GOATS as well as delicious fresh goats cheese.

It’s a smooth cheese, very soft and fluffy and mousse-like. The rind has a bit of chewy, solid texture to it. It reminds me of banana skin (in texture, not taste!), and it contrasts with the softness of the curd inside. The curdy paste tastes fresh and salty. It’s got a pale nuttiness – macadamia and almond – and a sweet creamy flavour. There are lots of bright fresh fruity tastes; green apples, lemon, a hint of gooseberry. The rind’s a little more bitter and astringent, tasting slightly of straw and slightly of splinters.

Keens cheddar

A raw-milk cow’s cheddar, made in Somerset and also bought from Neals Yard Dairy

This is a wedge of yellow cheese, slightly crumbly, with traces of cloth at the rind.

It’s quite firm and hard, melting slowly. It tastes initially smooth, sweet and fudgey and nutty, and turns sharper and more acidic as it melts. There are hints of tangy orange and pineapple, and of manure, and there are crunches of calcium lactate crystals between my teeth as I eat it. It’s got a good lingering and developing complexity to it.

The scraps of cloth around the rind should probably indicate that the rind’s not meant for eating, but I try it anyway. The rind’s harder than the rest of the cheese, unsurprisingly, and tastes like school-lunch milk that’s been sitting in a vacumn flask for some hours. It’s mellower than the centre of the cheese, and with a concentration of those pineapple flavours from inside.

I think the goaty fresh Tymsboro pips it for me, but I’m easily seduced by soft bright salty goat cheeses.  My colleague Janos also prefers the goaty goodness, finding the cheddar a bit too intense; it’s probably a good thing that we hadn’t gone with my first choice of Montgomery’s cheddar, which is a paws-in-the-air all night raveup of a cheese. This Keen’s is a little more refined than that.

Gorgonzola dolce

A blue cow’s cheese, made in Italy, and bought from The Tasting Room

We have a slice of this milky, melty, sparsely blue-smattered cheese. It’s pale and creamy, with a slightly darker rind. It’s got an almost jelly-like soft texture, smooth and silky, and very melt-in-the-mouth-ish.

This is very exciting! Kat smears a wedge of this soft cheese onto her piece of baguette, and chomps down on it. It ‘tastes of blue cheese’, unsurprisingly. It’s tangier than she anticipated, and soggy. She gamely eats the rest of the piece – it can’t be terrible – but declines to try another piece.

The taste – and this is not meant as a complaint, at all – reminds me a little of the toilets at Glastonbury. I’m not sure that I want to examine this thought any further.  As well as a whiff of long-drop, this is a very sweet and milky blue cheese. The blue taste is quite mild, and the caramelly fudgey milk taste is like milkshake. This cheese is smooth, sweet and gentle. It’s possibly a little too unassuming but gorgeously gloopy.

Cashel Blue

This was written about in more detail here.

Next up is this soft and spicy blue; it’s been a favourite of mine for years. Kat tries it and declares that it ‘doesn’t taste of blue cheese’ (I dispute this assertion) and proceeds to munch her way through this with relish. SUCCESS!

Next up, in the Kat Cheese Challenge, will be some Roquefort.

A raw-milk goat’s cheese, made in East Sussex and bought from Neal’s Yard Dairy

This is a white log, covered in a soft and fuzzy white mould. Slicing through, underneath the thin furry covering is an even thinner line of dark ash, and then the cheese itself – slightly translucent at the edges, opaque, bright white and with a slightly crumbly texture inside.

It’s got the putty-like, melt-in-the-mouth texture common in goat cheeses, and a good whomph of salt. (I love salt. I love salty cheeses. I might have mentioned this before.) There’s a grassiness, almost a seediness*, to the rind, which develops into a nutty sweetness in the centre. There’s a subtle goaty taste and bright citrus flavours; the usual lemon, but also something more fragrant and floral. It’s smooth and milky, sweet and salty.

* When I say seediness, I mean sort of seed you put in the ground to make a plant, not the dark alleyway, neon signs, shady character sort of seediness. This is not that sort of cheese.  Now I’m trying to think of seedy cheeses, though. Grubby? Aged? Boozy?

Cotherstone

A pasturised cow’s milk cheese from Durham, bought from Neals Yard Dairy

I have a wedge of this cheese, pale yellow and incredibly curdy and crumbly, with a off-white, slightly peachy pink mottled rind.

This airy, open cheese feels very insubstantial in my mouth, and soon melts and crumbles away. The rind is hard and almost crunches under my teeth. This is a mild cheese, with lactic yoghurty flavours, and it reminds me of a Wensleydale, more than anything else.

It’s got something of bubblegum to it, and of other sweetshoppy, nostalgic flavours. Coconut ice? Milk teeth? The exact match remains elusive – nostalgic tastes and smells so often do – but I think it’s sweet vanilla and fudge flavours that I taste. These are mellowed further by a smidge of hazlenut, but all this sweetness is tempered by this cheese’s dominant yoghurty tang.

The fluffy, airy, swiftly fading cheese is reminding me of candyfloss, slightly, in the way it melts away so quickly and feels so ethereal.  I’m glad that it’s not sticky, or teeth-achingly sweet, though.

I wonder what it is that makes cheese taste of bubblegum? And is it the same thing that makes lovely, silly Zinfandel taste of it?

My colleague Janos waves his arms about and growls in a happy manner, and when pressed to comment, says ‘NOM NOM NOM’. I agree.

Under all the rules of the game, the HASDA is a station pub, though the bounds and catchment area of Euston Station means that there is a far nastier station pub directly inside the frame of Euston (the Britannia – handily twinned with the walk-in Medi+Care Centre). But then Euston is a funny place, a new build carved out of the old, all black and concrete. The old name conjured up athe glorious age of rail travel, steamy engines which had long gone. The new name conjured up the old Euston Station, with its Doric Arches, rather than all new Euston’s Dullish Arses. But even in ten years this has changed; the slightly overgrown concourse of what may well be Euston Square has become slowly inhabited by swish looking portakabined Nandos and the like. It is like the Harlequin centre in Watford had sent its food court on holiday, with Krispy Kreme and Banger Bros missing the return train. Sometimes I look out of the windows in the Doric Arch and remember when it was all distressed concrete and weeds around here.

Actually the HASDA is that even rarer of breeds. A successful, brutalist pub in an office block adjoined to a BUS STATION. A pub which is on the first floor, with its toilets locked away two floors below, locked for fear of vagrants living in them. I once went to a Izikaya on the ninth floor of a tower block in Nigata in Japan, and it had a similar feel of locked in grimness, which vanished as soon as the first beer was drunk. And luckily the beer in the HASDA has always been good. This gives the HASDA its edge, and makes it much more than a quick commuter turnaround pub. It is perfectly set out for a quick drink. But we have had quite slow, long and protracted drinks here too. The Top 100 Films of All Time In 2003 was worked out in the Head Of Steam around a nice big central table, and other short drinks have lasted until closing time. Indeed this very list of pubs was supposed to have been worked out in the Doric – except it was too full.

Which does bring us to the HASDA’s downfall (for this list at least). It is a commuter, station pub and therefore can get unfeasibly rammed at times. There are not that many tables (and you can never get the train carriage table these days), so for a big group it is sometimes suicide in there. Bearing in mind its proximity to a number of other great pubs, losses are often cut and the party moves on. Leaving a bitter taste about this otherwise wonderful pub.

It is also one of the few pubs where the landlord, or chief barman, or whatever his sarcastic but perfect job title is, has stayed the same for a long period of time. I cannot help but think that this is the main reason it still offers so many interesting other beers after Fullers bought the place. Its also why the sport is never too loud, why the beer is kept well and the food is adequate. I know there are others who want to declare a sort of seedy love for the HASDA, so I will leave it to them too. All I have to say is “CX4321” and it all comes flooding back.

A semi-hard raw-milk goat cheese, from Catalonia, Spain, and bought from Brindisa.

We have a wedge from a small wheel of this cheese. It’s crumbly and a clean white in the centre, and covered outside in a distinctive mushroomy grey mould. My colleague Janos, one of today’s co-eaters of cheese, chooses this one because it looks rotten.

It tastes goaty, certainly, but not overwhelmingly so. There’s a fruity tang to this cheese, and an acidic sharpness that’s tempered with a yoghurty creamyness. I can detect a nutty undertone – hazelnuts and walnuts, particularly – as well as a fresh green herbal grassiness.

The rind is hard, and the outside of it feels slightly fuzzy in my mouth. It tastes subtly of blue cheese, is slightly astringent, and surprisingly sweet and nutty, mellow and smooth.

The right proportions of rind and cheese, eaten together, create a smooth, sweet creamy thing of WONDER, with the spicy mellow of the rind and the sharp salt of the paste balancing each other perfectly. Janos refuses to eat the rind and misses this magic.

Torralba Mahón

A semi-hard raw-milk cow cheese, from Menorca, Spain, and also bought from Brindisa.

This is another wedge from another small wheel. It’s got a bright orange-coloured rind, and is a creamy pale colour inside, although with a flakier, rather than crumbly, texture.

My initial impression is that it’s salty! Almost mouth-dessicatingly salty. I love salt. It’s also bright and lemony, quite sharp, tangy and piquant. The rind is smooth and chewy and sweet, and tastes of paprika. I’d assumed that the bright orange was from annatto, but  my tastebuds say otherwise.

Lars nabs a piece and has this to say: This cheese is NOT suitable for any salt unresistant animals, so Slug & Flea, if you can hear me, STAY AWAY, ~ this will kill you instantly. His full review is here, the big cheeseblogging copycat!

This tastes, I think, of seaside and sunshine and summer, and warmth and brightness. Outside is icy-cold. The puddles were iced over and the ground frosty, this morning, when I cycled into work. It’s dark when I leave work every evening. I am wearing three pairs of socks to keep my feet warm. The vibrant orange colour, bright paprika spiciness, and seasalty taste of this cheese cheer me and warm me; it’s a little mouthful of summer. And now the sun is shining outside!

A large sign outside declares the pub’s USP: “The Only London Pub in Two Halves,” the place being housed in two buildings either side of the alleyway. On one side, the larger bar is an L-shaped room with ample tables and a couple of tellies. The tasteful decoration includes big ornamental mirrors, prints of olden-times navy business and a large portrait of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, the 17^th Century Admiral from whom the pub takes its name and who presented a spectacular case for an accurate means of calculating longitude by striking rocks off the Isles of Scilly, wrecking four ships and killing himself and his entire crew. His stern, well-fed face gazes at you from the pub signs and portraits in both bars, unaware of impending doom.

The other side is a much cosier place and, for me, where the pub stands out. Here, the bar is tiny; the ground floor only has room for a small table, a couple of booths and a snug at the back just about big enough for two people. At quiet times, its size, dark wood-panelling and lack of modern fittings make it feel like you’re hanging out in London during the Restoration and Samuel Pepys is about to burst in with some seriously juicy gossip about the King’s latest mistress. Unfortunately, quiet times are rare so it becomes necessary to slip past the crowds and head upstairs to the Crow’s Nest, well known by the pubcrafty as the last part of the pub to fill up at peak times. It’s a quiet, sparsely-decorated room with couple of decent-sized tables for seating bigger groups. It lacks its own bar but – joy of joys – I love a pub with a dumb waiter and here, one is available to perform the essential service of getting large rounds upstairs without having to negotiate the narrow bends and steep staircase.

It’s a Hall & Woodhouse pub so the beer is excellent: Badger Best, IPA and Tanglefoot will satisfy the needs of ale lovers and the big bar has the space to carry a few guest beers. Hofbrau and Peroni are on tap for lager drinkers. Despite often being crowded, the staff are attentive and being served is hardly ever a problem. If I have any complaints about the place at all, it’s that they could probably do with a cat.

Thankfully that passed — if a little too slowly — and it became The Old Suffolk Punch once again. A reliable if unremarkable Greene King pub. Well I do have one remark, though I imagine it’s about Greene King food menus chain-wide: The Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding wrap with gravy (and chips). Behold:

Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud ... in a wrap

From the menu my colleagues and I were imagining a bread wrap around slices of beef and some tiny Yorkshire puds, but it was probably the IPA getting in the way of the obvious interpretation. A flat Yorkshire pud-style batter pancake was the wrap. Brilliant. You pick it up by the batter wrap with the beef and horseradish sauce trapped inside and dip it in the bowl of gravy. NOM, NOM, and three times NOM.

Well it was new to me. This update on a classic, I can get behind. And in to my tum.

A soft unpasturised cow’s cheese, made in Switzerland and bought from KäseSwiss.

A round of soft white cheese, smattered with a bright white bloom, and striped with little ridges from where it’s been sitting on racks to mature. Inside it’s soft and pliable, the colour of cream.

This cheese is fantastically milky, and melts away to in my mouth. The thin delicate rind has a slightly crumbly texture, and tastes of heather, flowers and astringent herbs. This complements the utter drippiness of the inside of this cheese, which is smooth, creamy, gently sweet and nutty, and has just a hint of cocoa to it.

Nifelchas

A cow’s milk cheese, also from Switzerland, and bought from KäseSwiss.

This wedge of cheese has a rough rich orange rind, and inside the paste’s a soft yellow, smooth and opaque, and sprinkled with little holes.

The holes (or eyes, as they are properly known) in Swiss cheese are caused by a wonderful array of bacterial action. In the first stage, little bacterias scoff up the lactose, and produce lactic acid. This is pretty standard cheese-making work; we should be thanking the lactose-eating habits of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus just about every time we pop something cheesy in our mouths. In holey cheeses, though, there’s another bacteria hanging about. Propionibacterium freudenreichii shermanii devours the lactic acid, produces other propionic and acetic acids – these give the cheese its distinctive buttery sweet nutty taste – and belches out clouds of C0². It’s the pockets of this that make those iconic eyes in the cheese.

You’ll almost certainly have encountered a sibling of  P.shermanii.  P.acnes lives happily and benignly on human skin, until it finds a greasy blocked pore. Hurrah! it says, Greasy Blocked Pore! and sets itself up a spotty new home.

But back to the cheese. This particular product of bacteria and milk has a rich tangy flavour, which develops as it melts. It’s salty and bright, buttery and rich, with a marmitey umami beefiness. It has a smooth creamy texture, a plummy fruitiness, and the sweet mellowness of hazelnuts and yeast. The rind is chewy and crumbly, and has just a very subtle hint of sockishness.

I foist a lump on Lars, and he says;

Would not kill any animal. Might leave them lying on their backs in a state of happy disfunction.

A blue pasturised cow’s cheese from Co. Tipperary, Ireland, bought from Neals Yard Dairy

This cheese has a thin, soft, slightly mouldy rind, and is pale yellow inside, with a hefty smattering of greeny-grey veining.

It’s soft and moist, and feels pliable. It melts in my mouth and is at once both wonderfully sweet and creamy, and fresh and sour. A subtle bitter flavour reminds me of firewood. (I have never actually eaten firewood! Twiggy and splintery and slightly cold.) There are smidges of bacon, of tartness, and a rancid, slightly salty undertone. The rind is crumbly and sweet and mellow. This is great – piquant and salty enough to delight me, but not overwhelming in any way. It’s not all that mild, but the rich creaminess mellows it out. Its huggy, friendly, comforting nature means that it would be a great recruiting cheese, converting the wary-of-mould to the ways of blue goodness.

Tunworth

A soft raw cow’s cheese milk from Hampshire, also bought from Neals Yard Dairy

I have half a round of this wrinkled cheese. It’s sparsely covered in a white bloom, with a moist creamy skin visible underneath. It’s gooey and dribbley inside, with a harder section – not yet melted – towards the centre. This solid centre is acidic – tangy and sour, sharp and bright; a very pleasant surprise. The outer edges of this cheese, gloopy, melting out onto the paper it’s been wrapped in, are more predictable; it tastes sweet, very buttery and nutty, of mushroom and salt, earth and straw – very much like a Camembert. It’s pungent like one, too – only just on the right side of stinky for eating in the office. This cheese is delicious all over, but discovering the secret sharp centre was the best part of eating it, and made me squeak with delight.

Ie, what did they like to eat with a cup of tea?

The Pakenham is a posties pub, backing on to the wasteland at the back of Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, and fifty percent of the drinkers there are usually postal workers. As such you would not be surprised to find big projected sports screens, a dartboard and plenty of rushed pint vertical drinking space. But its horseshoe bar also keeps its beers very well (I think of it as the spiritual home of Doom Bar in London), and the excellent bar staff know how to work their crowd. Even when three deep at the bar at midnight, everyone seems to get served quickly, there is a way in and out of the bar and I have never seen any kind of frustration set in. Perhaps it is the public service ethos and sort/delivery background of its clientele. Perhaps they just have good staff, it not easy to constantly be ready for customers with the lack of sightlines in a horseshoe shaped bar.

But the USP of the Pakenham is its late licence. Before the change in licensing laws, and even after, it was the most civilised place to get a late beer in central London. You knew you could rock up after eleven and have no trouble getting in, and probably get a bit of space to drink in too. We used to do Poptimism in a pub two minutes away, that would kick out at midnight and then twenty of us would invade the Pakenham. I never heard a grumble from either side of this relationship, punters got served and the pub was happy to serve us.

So then we started getting there earlier. It was a big pub that kept its ale well and had cheap food (BIG BELLY BURGER). It started to become a post work pub occasionally. And then another aspect of the Pakenham became apparent. It is a lovely session pub. Large enough to accept twenty people when full means nice and large when quiet. Never empty due to the steady delivery of postmen, but easy to spread along the tables, grab a bit of good value food and enjoy yourself. Nice, bright, well kept with proper pub tat on the walls and a great jukebox too (since gone unfortunately). And once, one shining moment when there was next to no sport on, they even had rodeo on the television.

I love the PAY KEN HAM. Call it by its name.

*It strikes me that this is not a very useful comparison as I appear to pronouce Wallander Wull End Er, which is also wrong.

My second US cheese is a four year old cheddar. FOUR? That’s very old for a cheddar, I think. I’m expecting something dense and dry and crumbly, and thick with crunchy lactic crystals. But this cheese is moist and soft. It’s also been coloured with annatto, and is a vivid orange colour. I grew up in Ireland, where cheese (and lemonade) come in red and white varieties, so this doesn’t bother me a jot. My cheese-eating chum, brought up on wholesome, un-frivolously-coloured English cheddar, is somewhat perturbed by the bright block we’re about to sample.

It’s not as intense as I expect it to be. It’s very sharp, tart and bitter – it reminds me of lemon pith – but there’s not much more to the taste than that. I’m spoiled, these days, and used to intense farmhouse cheddars, with pockets of different flavours – a new cheese in every bite! – and enough character that you can tell what the cow ate for breakfast that day. And, yes, a good whomph of manure. This cheese is uniform, and bland beneath the lemony sharpness. I think it’s spent its four years in some cold sealed sterile place.

Frozen peas are one of the most important foods of the modern age. No, listen, right; they’re technically a pulse so they contain protein and also they are green so they contain vitamins, maybe even some fibre. They’re good to eat AND good to put on your ankle after hilarious sports-related injuries at school. They are, in many ways, the ultimate super food and most importantly, they’re about 74p a bag.

Not only are frozen peas a cheap and easy answer to, say, ‘this lazy curry I’ve made looks a bit dull, what can I put in it that isn’t red?’ Or ‘am I going to feel guilty if I just eat fish and chips?’ Or ‘what can I eat this massive pat of butter with?’ They’re also ALWAYS THERE. If you’ve been living somewhere more than two weeks you can guarantee a bag of frozen peas will have developed, like frost-crust, down the back of your freezer. In this sense, they are the cheapest of all foods insofar as consciously buying them appears to be totally unnecessary.

Frozen peas can validate any meal. Eating rice and Marmite, you carb-loving saltlick? Stick some frozen peas in and it’s HEALTHY. Strangely tempted by that jar of mint sauce that’s been sitting at the back of the fridge for awhile? Lavish it onto your frozen peas and it’s GOURMET. All you’ve got left in the cupboard is a can of Lidl spaghetti hoops? Insert frozen peas and one of those plastic-wrap cheese slices and it’s sort of like a LASAGNE.

Hrmm well possibly no it’s not but the point is that before the insertion of frozen peas, a lot of cheap, cheap food can be the sort of ‘JUNK FOOD DIET SHOCK HORROR’ that the Daily Mail would love but as soon as you’ve added the good, honest pea then these things become simple, wholesome* meals made by people just trying to scrape by, rather than too lazy/drunk go to the supermarket. Although actually the top frozen pea recipe is thus:

INGREDIENTS:
Handful of frozen peas

METHOD:
Put frozen pea in mouth, suck it until it melts, enjoy its sweet and crunchy flavour.
Repeat.

Joy.

*Ok, not the Lidl spaghetti hoops. Never the Lidl spaghetti hoops. You can get the peas stuck in the hoops, though, making ALIEN PLANETS which are clearly far better than being wholesome.

The Trinity is the only pub outside Zone 1* on this list. That’s not to say that we are a bunch of central London fanatics, but it is where we pretty much all work and, therefore, where we’ve spent most evenings in the pub. I’d left the Exmouth by the time this stage in proceedings had been reached so I’m a little short on the main thrust of the arguments that got the Trinity this far up the list, but I can tell you about what I like about it:

It’s the nicest pub in Brixton

And when you’re faced with a three hour gap between the end of work and halfway through the second support at the Academy that’s all you can ask for really. Because it is the location of the Trinity, only a ten minute walk from the Brixton Academy that led it to being visited, never mind nominated. The only time I’ve been here and not gone on to a gig was when The Specials cancelled at half 5. But this is damning with faint praise, they do a cracking pint of Ordinary, the service is good, they serve big portions of decent food and have a nice beer garden out the back if you are some sort of beast of the field. Much like the Pineapple in Kentish Town it does seem to have become the haunt of A Certain Type Of Gig Goer, but then that’s maybe because I’m only going to Certain Types Of Gigs (and I freely admit to fitting the profile of the Certain Type)…

There was one night, just after the smoking ban came in (I’m thinking the night of the Carter gig?), when I arrived quite early (what? I was EXCITED!) to find that they’d replaced the carpet right through the pub and all you could smell was NEW CARPET, it was the weirdest thing, like drinking in Allied…

FancyAPint
Beer In The Evening
Randomness Guide to London

*sorry non-Londoners, but this includes you too. Although apart from the Three Goats Heads and the Turf in Oxford, the Windmill in Stansted Airport and the Brothers Bar at Glastonbury I can’t think of many non-London bouzers where a gang of FT contributors have been there at the same time. Oh, I suppose DBA in New York and the Small Bar in Chicago should get honourable mentions…

My cheese was not as melty as this one

My colleague Lars joins me for a cheesy lunch, and fancies something brie-ish oozing out of bread. We acquire a little wooden box of camembert from Mons – it’s the drippiest white-rind cheese they’ve got for sale today. It’s covered in a slightly patchy and uneven fuzzy white mould, and a rich, sticky orange rind peeks out from underneath this. The pale creamy yellow paste’s exposed when I cut a wedge, and while it’s not quite as oozy I’d count perfect, it’s still pretty moist.

It smells wonderful, but luckily no officemates complain. The rind is slightly crumbly, with an initial, unexpected grassiness and a hint something odd under its butteryness. It takes me a while to identify the savouryness of moules. The paste inside is gloriously melted under the rind, and a tiny bit chalky towards the centre. It tastes great: creamy and mushroomy, with a rich buttery mouthfeel, and hints of walnut and truffle and earth, but also with a slight astringency, a twiggy prickle, a lactic tartness and just the faintest whiff of ammonnia.

Lars thinks that this cheese “could kill a small animal – not a beaver, but maybe a frog.” I have no idea what he’s talking about! I think this cheese will be even better in a week or two, when it’s had time to get oozy and melty, and even more mushroomy mellow, but we’ve almost polished off the box between us, and I can’t see the little wedge that’s left, wrapped in the office fridge, surviving beyond tomorrow.

Snow White Goat Cheddar

This is a hard cheddar cheese, made in Wisconsin from pasturised goats milk

Cheddar made from goat’s cheese seems incorrect, but of course I can’t wait to taste it. The block I have doesn’t gleam like the snow outside, but it’s a very pale off-white. It’s opaque in the centre, and turns slightly translucent towards the crumbly brown rind. There’s also some greeny blue mould growing on the underside, but I believe this to be an unintended addition.

The rind’s too hard and chewy to enjoy, and the blue-green mould growing on the underside is definitely not for eating; bitter and unpleasant. The paste inside’s sour and tart and slightly spiky, with a nutty undertone to it. My cheese eating companion, in a fit of hyperbole, pictures it as a grumpy old goat of a cheese, with a long scruffy twig-tangled beard and a bad temper.

We’re eating this cheese with a sweet, nutty mostly-rye bread made from the shook-out ends of all the flour jars. (It was too cold and I was too lazy to go to the shops.) I thought this bread would be far too sweet to cosy up well with a cheese, but it’s a perfect companion to this one, and draws out a smooth and mellow caramel, nutty creaminess that really rounds out the cheese and balances its grumbling and sharpness.

A small raw-milk goats cheese, made in Sussex, bought from Neals Yard Dairy.

This is a squat little barrel of cheese. It’s covered with a soft fuzzy white mould on the outside,  and is creamy white and crumbly in the middle.

It’s smooth, dense, and sweet, soft and incredibly creamy – much creamier than the average goat cheese, I think. There’s a really subtle fruityness hidden beneath the cream; green apples and a touch of lemon. In the finish there’s a hazelnut sweetness and a very gentle mellow yoghurty tang.

This isn’t a very complicated cheese. It will not pounce on you with its lemony sharpness, or sting your mouth with its prickly moulds. It’s a happy mouthful of mild and creamy goodness – comforting and unalarming and very tasty.

Coolea

A gouda-style cow’s milk cheese, made in Cork, Ireland, and bought from Neals Yard Dairy

Coolea has a bright fruity orange rind. The cheese itself is orangey-yellow, smooth and nearly opaque, with tiny gaps and flecks.

The rind’s made of wax. I try a bit anyway, because I am a bit stupid very concientious about this cheese-eating lark. It is chewy and waxy and not actually food at all.  Oops!

Inside, the cheese is much tastier! It’s dense and very sweet and nutty, with lots of fruit (hi, pineapples!), and a smooth cocoa-like silky dark taste. There are bursts of savoury umami-ish marmitey flavour.

This cheese appears quite innocent  - smooth yellow cheese, pretty orange rind  - and on the first taste it appears to be fairly restrained; sweet and nutty and mellow. But this develops into a bright zestiness that’s almost spicy, and a mouthwatering savouryness – stronger and more intense than the first bite would have you expect.  And delicious!

NEXT WEEK! Cheesy Lover International! I have two smuggled American cheddars to test out.

The thing about the Brickies is that it has , like the good Sam Smiths of the turn of the millennium, two very distinct areas for drinking. Downstairs, it is bright, breezy, small and – well – bricky. A nice central bar which splits the downstairs into the poky one table back room and the only slightly bigger four table front area. Downstairs is a place for plotting, for a quick pint after a film, or a night spiralling out of control (the Brickies is of course fantastically close to the Spanish Bar). Downstairs I have seen some appalling pub behaviour from the best of friends, I have seen pranks played, I have sat rolling my eyes at another play of Kid A* as we make the most blatant table grab in history scaring off two poor shopgirls. Downstairs is business turning to pleasure. Oh and dodging the dartboard too.

Upstairs, well upstairs is one of the few places I approve of sofas in the pub. The real problem with sofas is that they are often difficult to get in and out of, especially while drinking. You sink into a hole, and you end up resembling an some sort of woodpecker rocking back and forth for your pint. Low slung leather sofas, picked to give the vibe of a gentleman’s club end up giving the vibe of a dormitory. Upstairs at the Bricklayers though eschews the leather sofas for a more robust, harder set of sofas, around some equally solid glass topped coffee tables. You can drink upstairs, be comfortable and it not feel wrong. And also the sofas a re set up for big groups, making it easy to turn into yet another garrulous session. More relaxed than downstairs, around the fire maybe, in the dark comfort of the upstairs. Unless…

There is one more mode of drinking at the Bricklayers, and it involves the very odd corner by the bar. The bar swoops round, has a couple of stools but barely enough room for more than a couple of people. And yet in that corner you seem to be able to fit no end of people slowly going mad. Yet again the pub provides the perfect air for vertical drinking too. As hard to find as a central London pub can be, at the end of Stephen Street off Tottenham Court Road, the Bricklayers has been all things to me. Tall, skinny, perhaps unprepossessing (the highest pub name in London?) Fancy a pint?

*It does seem a lot of our fond early noughties pub memories do rotate around inappropriate uses of Radiohead in pubs.

But hey! We love a challenge. I flicked through the book until I found something that looked achievable with only a minimum of outlay. Spherical mozzarella! This called for nothing more exotic than some sodium alginate. Handily, there was a jar tucked away in the back of a cupboard – the remnant of a previous miserable failure at kitchen science. If you’re cooking along at home, it’s available to buy online too.

The science of this is pretty straightforward: where algin meets calcium, a gel forms. By dropping calcium-rich liquid (in this case, the blended mozzarella) into a algin solution (or vice versa), the outside of the liquid turns into a gel, and encloses the still-liquid centre. The result is a soft ball that bursts when you bite into it – a surprise mouthful of liquid flavour. Or that’s the theory.

Assembling the makings and the scientific apparatus.

We measured everything carefully, because this is SKIENCE and SKIENCE demands precision.

The mozzarella and its juice are blended up together. Then the cream is heated and blended into the mozzarella, resulting in a fine grainy liquid. This is salted and popped in the fridge.

The sodium alginate is blended into 1kg of water. We used distilled water; otherwise, I believe, the algin will gel with the calcium in the hard London tapwater before it’s had a chance to get happy with the calcium in the mozzarella.

Spoonfuls of the mozzarella are dropped into the algin bath. This is where it all started to go wrong. My dropping technique is suspect, and we ended up with mozzarella splodges, rather than balls. I initially blamed the triangular measuring cup, but experimentation with egg cups and shot glasses yielded no better results – just more washing up.

After twelve minutes they’re taken out and we test the solid-est one on an innocent third party. She squeaks and approves. I try the next-most-solid one, and it’s delicious! But for every just-about edible globule of cheese-juice we have two failures. How to get the spheres SPHERICAL? I do some Scientific Research, and discover someone suggesting that we freeze them.

So it’s twee ikea icecube moulds to the rescue! We leave them overnight to freeze, and have a minor burst of science the next day, which yields a bowl of round (ish) mozzarella balls in water, which we force-fed to party guests later that night. Sorry, party guests! (I totally forgot to try making a CHEESE MARTINI with one of them, too.)

IMPORTANT SKIENTIFIK CONCLUSIONS!

The freezing made the texture of the mozzarella juice more granular and slightly less pleasant, but it did mean that we created small balls rather than useless splodges.

The freezing worked really well apart from the texture going weirdly crumbly, though, so I might try this again with some liquid more suited to freezing. Cheese is not a friend of freezing.

The mozzarella was delicious before we blended it – it felt like a bit of a shame to turn it into stunt food.

Baby mozzarella spheres look very eggy! Wouldn’t it be awesome to make minature poached eggs that were really made of mozzarella and some bright orange or yellow cheese yolk? And serve them on toast made out of something surprising?

Estate pubs, of course, occupy a special place in pub fandom. Being integrated into the fabric of a residential (often Council-built) estate makes them peculiarly close to the lives of the residents, and often makes for a more cosy and welcoming environment, if always with the danger of a hostile reception for outsiders. You never can quite be sure. Cask, which opened in mid-2009 as a renovation of the old Pimlico Tram, is classic estate pub from the outside: dark and forbidding, squirreled away at the foot of a fairly ugly post-war residential block. However, inside the space has been opened out, with light streaming in from large windows at the right of the pub, the walls painted brightly and decorated with maps, and plentiful cushions lining the benches.

This in itself could be the prelude to some hideous gastro-pretentious makeover (the place is worryingly called “Cask Pub & Kitchen”, and the particular shade of green adorning the walls isn’t exactly comforting), but where Cask excels is in the range and quality of beers they offer. Five handpulls which offer dependable and ever-changing stand-bys like Dark Star ales and the Everard’s Tiger which provided our group sustenance all night on our first visit. Add to this a vast range of German and Belgian bottled beers, and a few ciders, and you’ve got… well, something that’s starting to sound like ad copy, but I’m trying to get across that this is a good pub in the hinterlands of Zone 1.

I use the word “hinterlands” advisedly, as of course it’s not so far from civilisation (aside from the tube station, the pub’s not exactly a stretch of a walk from Victoria), but somehow Pimlico remains a corner of central London which just seems cut off, a quality exploited by Ealing Studios in its 1949 comedy Passport to Pimlico. Perhaps this is due to its primarily residential character (rare enough in central London), or perhaps because it’s physically cut off by the train lines into Victoria, but then perhaps it’s just because those of us who go out drinking can’t reach our homes so easily from there.

Therefore, the fact it shows up on this list is a sign that the pub is getting something right, and it’s why we’ll be finishing up there on our annual pub crawl this year.

(Cask on Fancyapint.)

Past crawls have taken in the Euston Hexagon, the Mornington Crescent, strange arcane routes across the river and last year a foray into Marylebone. This year we are again pushing further afield, by about half a mile and have settled on the wonderful environs of Pimlico, and its surprisingly large number of estate pubs!

So I give you Das Pimlico Boot (when you see the map it makes sense).

We start at 3pm by Victoria Station: The Kings Arms: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub1525.php
4pm: Jugged Hare: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub1521.php
5pm: White Swan: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub447.php
5:45pm: Morpeth Arms: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub446.php
6.30pm: The Grosvenor: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3547.php
7:15pm: The Pride Of Pimlico: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3833.php
Finishing at
8pm: The Cask: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3531.php

We will then stay at the Cask til kicking out time, or someone suggests going to another pub to make it eight (I think we eventually made nine in the end last year!) Please come along, and if it is your first time remember this isn’t about drinking (completely) – rather savouring the interesting architecture of London’s pubs. Well, maybe a bit of drinking too.

Facebook event here if you want to invite other people.

The Blue Posts, Rupert Street, was my first London love. Sure I had dallied with a few pubs in Oxford, and there were a few old boilers in my suburb that I had affection for, but the BPRS was the first pub I “discovered” and made mine. And we fit together perfectly. It was a small, unpretentious pub in the heart of the West End, set on a tiny alley which is a perfect rat run between China Town (China Street more like) and the Trocedero. It had a downstairs built mainly for vertical, and stool based drinking but a good selection of ales and a compact but well stocked bar. Upstairs was not always open, the bar upstairs even less so though they were always happy to ferry stuff up in its dumb waiter. But upstairs had five tables which it was possible to fit a largish group around and for its size, you could always have a good night in there. I think the pokiness of the downstairs put people off exploring. My enthusiasm for it is cataloged here.

In the earliest days of going there I thought that Rupert Street was just an extension of Berwick Street, that the bottleneck of Raymond’s Revue Bar did not change the name of the street. This led to, very early on, the odd confusing line of calling it The Blue Posts, Berwick Street – which is of course a pub in its own right. Which then led me on to the existence of the six central London Blue Posts. My pub now had history and stories about it. Berwick Street (and Rupert Street by actual extension) was my favourite street in central London, when I used to bunk of school it was always my destination. By the time the 00’s came around I could happily tell stories of youthful wide eyed wanderings, avoiding disaster (one of those bunking off days had me missing the Kings Cross Fire by twenty minutes), sleeping in a pub (the White Horse Rupert St), bumping into pop stars and stories of the Blue Posts itself. There was an entertaining early UK blog meet there. The first Trig Brother had a key moment in this pub. I had my 28th birthday in this pub, taking over the whole upstairs on a Friday night. Not to mention this sterling write up in its place as part of the epic Blue Posts’ Pub Crawl.The Blue Posts Rupert Street seemed to offer everything, including a wonderful jukebox.

You can fall out of love with a pub. Sometimes it is you. Sometimes it is them. With the BPRS it was both of us, but it started with the jukebox. The jukebox had always been a draw when small groups of us would congregate downstairs. Our pop agenda was well served by this jukebox, though it also allowed for storming renditions of Immigrant Song and Meatloaf. Then suddenly it wasn’t there. Within weeks the space the jukebox had been had been replaced with some low tables. The beer changed, the ale went down to London Pride and more dull lagers popped up. Upstairs seemed to be closed or booked out every night, the staff were different. We catalogued its decline here.

OK, I had changed too. Now I was going out drinking with much larger groups. Manageable Friday nights of six or seven people were going upwards of ten every week. Midweek Soho drinks were skewing towards Sam Smith’s pubs because of the expense. And what expense. I think the BPRS was the first place I liked that sold me a three pound pint. Blackboards were outside it, enticing in tourists. The Blue Posts Rupert Street was no longer the pub it was, and I was a different drinker. We drifted apart. A friend had her 29th in there: the pub was seeing other people.

I didn’t go in it for five years.

I have been a couple of times recently, just for old times sake. Another friend had a birthday meet in it, citing happy times. We were cramped at the bar, though the beer was better than it had been when I fell out. The table arrangement still seems crazy downstairs, and they seem to put on live music at incomprehensible times. Another time we went, the whole downstairs was booked out for a party. When has a pub ever booked out its main room, but left its function room open? The staff got pernickity about how many people were sitting around our table, to maximize seating opportunities. The last time I was in there, I almost got into a fight with an old geezer who had left his coat lying around on the only free table. The pub itself menaced me. Sometimes you can’t go back.

But the Blue Posts Rupert Street is there for the memories. I’ll go back again, maybe in five years. It is still my first real pub relationship. But you can’t live in the past, and you certainly can’t drink there.