Cheese: Appenzeller

Appenzeller cheese is made of cow's milk and is a name-controlled cheese produced in the Appenzell Canton of northeastern Switzerland, near Austria. It is one of the 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die (2008, p. 312). 

There are historic references to this cheese going back to the late 13th century. It is made from curd that has been cooked or heated before pressing. While it ages it is washed or brined in sulz, a mixture of pepper, herbs and white wine or cider which flavors the cheese and promotes a rind. This was probably introduced by monks like other washed rind cheeses. It is a wheel shaped cheese with a brown rind and yellowish paste and has scattered holes pea-size holes. There are about 75 dairies that produce it, each having their own proprietary brine wash. Three of the dairies make it with raw milk, recognizable by a bluish-gray line between the rind and the past. 

It is variously described as: (a) having a strong smell and "a nutty or fruity flavor, which can range from mild to tangy;" (b) "an aroma similar to burnt butter...similar to Gruyere but spicier, it is tangy and pleasantly sharp;" (c)  it is a "mountain cheese that is sharper than Gruyere, but not as sharp as Tete de Moine...[I]t has a singular fruity tang." Classic, which comes in a silver label, is aged three to four months. Surchoix, in a gold label, is aged four to six months. Extra, in a black label, is aged six months or more. 

Appenzeller Extra

I had the six month aged Extra, purchased from DTLA Cheese in Los Angeles. I like it quite a bit. It can be a little on the strong side, for example I've had it in salads and with some weisswurst on a tortilla, and the flavor really stands out, but it is fantastic on its own as a tasting cheese. 

Watermelon Radish

The watermelon radish, also known as the beauty heart radish, is larger and much more beautiful than the traditional red radish we normally get at the store. It is one of the 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die (A Quintessence Book, 2008), p. 198. They have reddish to reddish and whitish flesh, white skin and green shoulders. They tend to get milder as they age, unlike other radishes, and their outer edges are hotter than the inner flesh which is sweet and crisp and mildly pungent. I'd never had watermelon radish before, but saw it recently at Clark's Nutrition and Natural Foods Market in Loma Linda. I only had a few, just enough to taste them. They would be a wonderful addition to a salad.

Watermelon radish - almost looks like a green turnip.

Fantastic looking inside - and these are less colorful than some of seen pictures of.

Cheese: Isle of Mull (Cheddar)

Isle of Mull cheese is made on one farm, Sgriob-ruadh farm, owned by Chris and Jeff Reade, on the Isle of Mull, near the principal town of Tobermory, off the west coast of Scotland. When Judy and I visited Scotland years ago we drove through Oban and contemplated taking the ferry to the Isle of Mull. However, it looked like the backup for the ferry was extensive and we continued on. So when I saw this cheese at DTLA Cheese in Los Angeles, the name caught my attention and had to try it. 

Isle of Mull cheddar cheese

It is a hard cow's milk cheese and is considered the king of Scottish cheddar cheeses, winning awards like the BBC Food and Farming Award, Best Scottish Cheese, British Cheese Awards Gold and a gold medal at the World Cheese Awards. The cows they use are predominantly Friesian, but they also have Ayrshire or Jersey and Brown Swiss cows and the cows milk is used raw. The cows feed is regularly supplemented with discarded fermented grain from the Tobermory malt whiskey distillery, which helps give the cheese a distinctive taste. And who said it is the California cows that are happy cows? It is matured in an underground cellar for up to 18 months and has been described as: (a) having a "complex, sharp, tangy and fruity flavor;" (b) "feisty, complex, sharp, yeasty, sharp, tangy and fruity;" (c) "quite a sharp taste, with hints of the fruity, yeasty and slightly alcoholic cows feed offering a feisty lingering tang;"   (d) "meaty, salty, boozy. There's no tang that I sometimes taste in cheddar, that tang is replaced by an alcohol note. It's not sweet...It's fruity, but without any sweet, like a savoury fruit. It's completely unlike any cheddar I have ever tasted. It's funky and yeasty and aggressive. It's boozy and sexy and weird" - this was a particularly good review and started by saying that this was his cheese seller's favorite cheese. 

The descriptions for the taste of this cheese were more varied and descriptive than those I've seen for any other cheese. I can't even begin to compete with those descriptions. I agree with the descriptions of sharp and tangy and it is quite strong. I love the location of the farm, the small-scale one farm operation and I also like the taste of the cheese. 

Colored Carrots

Believe it or not, there is a World Carrot Museum which gives detail on the history of carrots. The earliest historic records for carrots has them being cultivated in what is now Afghanistan in about the year 1000. Those original carrots were probably purple or yellow. In the 1100s carrots spread to Spain through North Africa and the Middle East. In the 1300s purple, white and yellow carrots were brought into the rest of southern Europe and were widely grown there by the 1500s. It was the Dutch who took newly developed orange carrots, which were developed from yellow carrots, and developed them over time to be sweeter and more consistent. The other colors of carrots were only kept alive in the more remote regions of the world. For example, purple and white carrots still grow wild in Afghanistan where they are used by tribesman to make an alcoholic beverage. Time has done a nice recent article on the different colors of carrots that are available now. 

Up until a few years ago, I had no idea that there was anything other than an orange carrot. I had a birthday meal at Ford's Filling Station in Culver City, the whole pig dinner, and it came with different colors of whole carrots saturated in cooked pork flesh. And they were marvelous. 

Whole pig dinner at Ford's Filling Station. Carrots in bottom corner.

When we got this, I specifically tried out the different colors of carrots.

Even more recently, at a farmers market in San Diego County, we came across some colored carrots being sold and purchased them and tried them. From what we tried and from what little I've read, purple carrots tend to be orange colored inside and don't taste much different than yellow carrots, but they do have a little peppery flavor. White carrots are yellow or cream colored and are a little sweeter and have less of the earthy flavor of the other carrot colors. Red carrots get their color from lycopene, the same pigment that gives tomatoes their red color, and have a taste pretty much like orange carrots. 

The different inside colors add to their value as garnishes.

Traditionally carrots have been stir fried or boiled, or apparently also made into alcoholic beverages. It is only the last 50 years that carrots have been eaten raw. It is not uncommon to find grated carrots in the all-you-can eat salad bar, or miniature carrots in snack tries. 

We baked our rainbow carrots and it was very fun having the different colors and tastes, comparing them side-by-side. I hope they will become more available as the different colors are great for garnishes in salads and other dishes, as well as to be focused on just themselves. 

Cheese: Ewephoria Extra Aged

Ewephoria, not surprisingly made out of sheep's milk, is a gouda style cheese made for Cheeseland, a Seattle importer of Dutch cheese, by a small farm in the Friesland province in northern Netherlands. Apparently aged sheep's milk cheese is "too gamy for American tastes," so Cheeseland worked with the Dutch farm to produce a cheese with "a sweeter and nuttier" taste solely for sale in the U.S. market to focus on the American sweet tooth. The Cheeseland website says, like typical marketing baloney, it "tastes like candy." If that were the case, candy would not be as popular among young children. Ewephoria is aged anywhere from 4 to 12 months (I see aging estimates that vary widely on different websites). I am assuming my "extra aged" cheese was aged toward the end of the longer time frame. I found that it is quite strong and quite dense, and still has a significant sheepy taste to it that I happen to like, although it may be a little more muted. Sweet is not a descriptive term I would have used to describe it, but all of the advertising literature uses the term. It may be a little sweeter than normal sheep's milk cheese, but calling it "candy" goes way, way too far. I'd not heard of this cheese until we saw it at DTLA Cheese in the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles. I really like it, but I love all sheep's milk cheese and wouldn't prefer this over many other aged sheep's milk cheeses. Much of the information for this came from an on-line article at SFGate dated March 8, 2014. 

Golden Beets

It has only been the last few years that I've come to like beets. I've learned to like them pickled, roasted, baked and even raw. But they are nasty to work with as they stain everything they come in contact with. Then I had some golden beet for the first time in a dish at Au Cinquieme Peche in Montreal. It was yellow and had a nice mild flavor. I thought, "I could really like these, I need to try them again." They are not available in the regular grocery stores we go to. But I've been able to have them three more times: once in a produce box we get from a local farm, once from a specialty health food store and once from a community market. I've found that they have a more mild taste, with less of an earthy taste, than red beets, they are much cleaner to work with because you avoid the stained red hands and sink, and they taste better raw or only partially cooked, than red beets do. When roasting multiple vegetables, they also make a wonderful color choice along with red beets, peppers, Brussels sprouts, etc. 

Golden beets 

Orange-ish on the outside and yellow on the inside.

Peeled

Sliced and ready for baking or roasting.

They add nice color to an array of roasted vegetables.

Cheese: Paski Sir

Paski sir, Croatian for "cheese from the island of Pag," is just that, a sheep milk cheese from that Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea.

Pag is a long thin island that looks more like a peninsula, until you look closely and see that it has some small separation from the mainland which is easily connected by a road, just north of Zadar. The island environment is what makes Paski sir distinctive. The Velebit mountain range is just east of Pag island on the mainland. The mountains cause the Pag Bora, a strong, cool, dry east/west wind, which scatters a dry salt dust all over the island. As the salt dust falls on the moist vegetation, it sticks, and only the resilient and aromatic plant species can survive, such as Pag Sage. It is feeding on the salty grass and aromatic vegetation, that gives the Pag sheep milk, and thus its cheese, part of its distinctive taste. There are about 40,000 Pag sheep on the island, five times more than the 8,000 humans, and they are smaller and produce less milk than a normal sheep, at most about one-half liter a day. Only about 80 tons of the cheese is produced each year. Paski sir is aged variously and of course the aging deepens the taste of the cheese. I've seen references to Paski sir aged from 6 months to 18 months. I've had Paski sir twice, once obtained from the Cheese Cave in Claremont and once from DTLA Cheese in the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles. You can see from the pictures that one of the cheeses was aged substantially longer: It is much more brown around the edges near the rind and has whitish crystals in the body of it. It is one of the 1001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die (p. 319). 

Paski Sir

This Paski Sir is aged longer than the one above. Darker edges near the rind and white crystals in the body.

Paski sir is traditionally served chunked and crumbled with olive oil. I also read suggestions to serve it with prsut (Croatian prosciutto), salted anchovies or black olives, so I decided to try some in that way. 

Paski Sir in olive oil, in anchovies packed in olive oil and plain.