This winter, turn to the dark and flavourful with our top cheese picks
With festival season in full swing, mid-winter is a social time in Tasmania. Get with the theme and present your guests with a platter of dark and moody cheeses, featuring big flavours and brooding looks. Here are our choices.
First up we’ve chosen Pyengana Cloth Cheddar. Cloth-matured for 12-24 months, it’s crumbly, bold and bitey, and looks great on the platter with its mottled cloth if you buy the large truckle. Classic accompaniments are quince paste, green apple slices, chutney, raisins and dates.
Bruny Island OEN is perfect with a pinot noir on a cold night. In fact during its making, this cheese is washed in pinot before being wrapped in vine-leaves and left to mature for 3-4 weeks. Once aged it’s complex and savoury.
Clothed in black wax, King Island Black Label Cheddar is rich, buttery and fruity with a savoury bite. Enjoy it with ham, crusty bread and pickled onions.
With veins of black truffle running inside this authentic sheep’s cheese from La Mancha in Spain, our Truffle Manchego is a flavour bomb. Matured for six months it has a creamy and just-crumbly, nutty flavour with a dark undercurrent of decadent and pleasantly pungent black truffle.
Edam is a semi-hard cheese which originated from the town of the same name in Holland. It’s a red waxed wheel which reveals a golden interior and has a mild, nutty flavour which sharpens as it matures.
Looking very much like an incendiary device the aptly named Lancashire Black Bomb is a sphere of tangy Lancashire cheese coated in black wax. Mature and nutty, it pairs well with pickled onions.
And finally our Mauri Gorgonzola, made in Italy for the last 100 years by the Marui family, while Gorgonzola itself has a history which can be traced back to the 8th century. Matured in a dark cave for 120 days this is a soft, sweet, blue cheese with a subtle creamy texture and a piquant finish. It’s best spooned from the centre of the wheel in devilish dollops. Quince paste or honey optional.