stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Let’s Talk About Cheese: Malvarosa

Nov 14, 2007 general food, groceries

I am noticing the more I post and actually document some of the meals I make that my childhood love affair with cheese has clearly progressed into my adult life. I don’t think there is a single day that goes by that I do not eat at least some kind of cheese, and with places like The Wine and Cheese Place and Whole Foods having such astonishing selections, it’s certainly a lot easier to give in today than it was in the days when fake, fluorescent-orange rinded muenster or Borden minis were the most exotic cheeses to be found at the market.

In my last post I used Malvarosa which I’m banking on most people not having had before.

Malvarosa is a Spanish sheep’s milk cheese. What that means for you, is that it’s high in fat as the general rule of thumb with cheese is that they go goat > cow > sheep in order of leanest to fattest.

Supposedly a semi-soft cheese, I’ve personally found it to be an incredibly firm cheese that when cold is even harder than a Parmesan.  Because of this you really should let it come up to temperature a bit before risking your precious fingers by going to battle sharp knife in hand. Its color is white and it’s a particularly interesting cheese because as they hang it in cheesecloth as it cures, it has the distinct indentations of the cheesecloth including a knot on top.  And it has a very buttery taste and texture do to the high fat content.

Murray’s Cheese has this to say:

First imported to the U.S. in August of 2004, Malvarosa began as a labor of love. To save the nearly extinct Guirra sheep, Valencian cheesemaker Enrique began producing this Manchego-like wheel. Frankly, we think it blows Manchego away. The paste is firm, but far more buttery, and incredibly rich and sweet. More like the popular favorite Pyrenees Brebis, this one is compulsively edible, down to its nearly butterscotch finish. Aged for a minimum of three months; careful cheesemaking and gentle pasteurization preserve an enormous hit of succulent flavor.

I agree, it’s definitely better than most of the Manchego I’ve had.

As an aside, when I use hard cheeses like this in salads I often peel off thin slices with a vegetable peeler in advance. They’re so thin they come up to room temperature faster (which you want your cheese to be), you don’t have to risk those digits, and aesthetically, they toss into salads nicely looking a whole lot slicker than grated cheese.

Go buy some cheese already.

Tags: cheese, malvarosa

Dinner and a Dash of Honey

Nov 13, 2007 farmers' markets, groceries, slow food, sustainable agriculture

I’m still silly busy at work, but rather than leave you empty handed, I wanted to quickly comment that it brought a smile to my face last Thursday when Ruhlman was talking about how great his salad would be with a fried egg on top. Fried eggs on salads rule, and as you can clearly see, I proved this only a couple days prior to his encouragement that “fat is good” when I made this salad for Ellie and me.

This incidentally is why I’d wanted the frisee the other day. I instead settled for arugula as Whole Foods was a sans frisee Whole Foods when I was lured into their shiny overpriced store.

Grilled Benne’s Best flank steak, fried Prairie Grass Farms egg, arugula, Bellews Creek red onion, malvarosa cheese, and a sherry vinaigrette (that had a little Esther’s Honey in it)

And speaking of Esther’s Honey. Esther is a really wonderful woman to speak with as she loves talking about her honey bees.

I never realized until the whole Colony Collapse Disorder scare how important the roll of honey bees is in the world of agriculture and was fascinated to find out, when she spoke at SLOWednesday, that there are huge honey beekeepers that transport their bees all over the country on semis to pollinate all sorts of crops nationwide.

Per Wikipedia…

“One major US beekeeper reports moving his hives from Idaho to California in January, then to apple orchards in Washington in March, to North Dakota two months later, and then back to Idaho by November — a journey of several thousand kilometers. Others move from Florida to New Hampshire or to Texas; nearly all visit California for the almond bloom in January.”

From further reading, this mass transportation apparently does not happen as widely in other countries, and it was this fact that exasperated the scare for so many farmers in America.

Another interesting side note is that she also taught us that honey bees will take over weaker hives they come across because really all they want is food and a weaker hives honey will do just fine. She specifically told one story about bees coming across a weaker hive that had Colony Collapse Disorder and they instinctively knew to move on. Apparently nobody is quite sure how the bees knew what the humans did not.

Moving back to the semis, the other thing I found interesting is that this is obviously how they get all those specific varieties of honey you see lining the gourmet food stores. They know exactly what the bees were pollinating not because they had to guess off taste alone, but because they took them to it in the first place.

And coming full circle back to my jar of honey…

When I bought it I’d asked Esther if she noticed a lot of flavor variation from batch to batch. The one I’d initially picked up was a darkish honey which she was unsure of. Many of the other bottles were much lighter, and she said her neighbor, who grows a lot of thyme, had been telling her the bees had constantly been around his herbs at the time she had bottled that honey. So I swapped for the lighter honey and it really does have a noticeable herbaceous quality to it. I’ve really been enjoying it, and I keep slinging it in just about anything I make where honey would even remotely work as it has a sort of lightness that isn’t as sweet and overpowering as other honey’s I’ve used.

Tags: Bellews Creek Farm, Bennes-Best-Meats, Esther's Honey, flank-steak, malvarosa, Pairie-Grass-Farms, salad