Saint-Marcellin
Cheese stats: A soft raw-milk cow’s cheese from Lyon, France
Bought from: Une Normande à Londres
This is a small round cheese, packed in its own little clay dish, pale and creamy with a white bloom on the outside. Breaking into it was harder than anticipated – it looks like a cream cheese – and the cheese was firmer and more elastic than anticipated. That said, it’s still a soft cheese – just not as soft and squishy as it looked.
It’s tangier and sharper than expected, too, and far more bitter. There’s a strong herbal taste, and some mouthfuls taste very strongly of rosemary. If I’d been guessing about the beast this cheese was made from, I might have said goat, and not cow, because of the tanginess. It’s also quite salty and creamy, and there are slightly nutty undertones.
Cheesy conclusion: This cheese appears to be a mild-mannered little round bundle of creaminess, when sitting in its pot in the cheese stall, but was surprisingly robust when we ate it. I liked this cheese, but I ate it alongside the U Bel Fiuritu, and that totally stole the show.
La Tur
Cheese stats: A soft cheese made from a blend of goat, sheep and cow milk, from Italy
Bought from: Gastronomica
This is a Three Beast Mashup Cheese, made from milk of cow and goat and sheep. I thought that it might be a bit of a stunt cheese, but it worked really well. It comes in a small round, and is creamy-white in colour. Towards the soft drippy squishy sticky exterior it tastes herbal and slightly rancid, in a good buttery way. Further inside it’s a light, fluffy – almost marshmallowy – cloud of salty creamy goodness, with a good lemonish tang that stops it being too cloyingly sweet or overwhelmingly creamy.
I can definitely detect the influence of goat in the cheese – it’s got a real tanginess – and of sheep in the creaminess. The cow contribution is harder to pin down; possibly it’s working more as a unifying influence for the other two milks.
Bad Vegan chum declares it much tastier than it looks – she was expecting something much milder.
Cheesy conclusion: I wasn’t sure if this would work, but it was both tasty and interesting.
Une Normande à Londres