A washed rind cow’s cheese from Co Cork, Ireland, bought from Neal’s Yard Dairy.
We have a wedge of this – an old favourite of mine – for lunch. The crumbly rind is a pale peachy, biscuity orange, and the paste inside’s gloriously liquid and drippy, oozing out and making puddles on the paper.
The cheese is wonderfully smooth and silky, and it tastes salty, nutty, and caramel-ish sweet. There’s a hint of rancid butter, smidges of yeast and mushroom, and a bit of chewy pungent meatiness. But there’s a more delicate flavour underlying the typical hearty washed rind – a mysterious and delicate taste that reminds me of roses, and my cheese-eating chum of tangerines. The rind’s got a grittiness that makes me think of cheesecake base and digestive biscuit crumbs – and it’s in the rind that those mysterious floral notes come to the fore. It tastes of turkish delight and buttercups, kumquat rind and wild strawberries. These are fragile flavours. I’m impressed that they manage to stand out against the mighty, meaty pungency of Brevibacterium linens‘s washed rind sockish whiff, and I’m delighted with the unexpected – and delicious – contrast.