Yoji and the Foodies

A kind soul sent a huge block of Edam cheese that weighs a ton!

Edamer or Edam cheese tastes pretty much like the mozzarella you buy at the grocery. It’s not salty and it does not smell. Cheese this huge could make A LOT of pizza using a variety of bread. My mind is on cheese party mode but I have limited ingredients at the moment, so I ended up making an open faced grilled/toasted cheese sandwich (sort of!).

I’m probably one of those crazy people who don’t get excited with cheese. Aside from  mozzarella, the only cheese that I would readily eat and not be coaxed, forced, or bullied into eating is brie. When I had my first taste of brie, it wasn’t love at first bite, but I’ve come to like it because it was all we had everyday for 2 weeks in a budget hotel somewhere south of London. Since then, I always look at the cheese section of supermarkets to see if there’s brie hiding. If the distributors of imported cheese are more aggressive than usual, brie would be there, together with very strange sounding cheese variants from equally strange sounding places where the cheese came from.

The truth is the price of brie is on the high side. This is specially true for people like me who are used to cheddar and some processed cheese sold in abundance. What I know about cheese, or brie for that matter, I can stick in a gnat’s ear, so sometimes the deciding factor would be the price. I compared the brie brands available in the supermarket and decided to go for Emborg brie. It’s also the cheapest at Php190 (which is also the reason I bought it haha!).

A little google sleuthing led me to the variants of brie and most are from Canada, or Quebec, to be exact. The Emborg brand is a Danish brie cheese.  I had an inkling that this is not the same brie I had years ago but I’m very open to tasting variants. I remember eating brie with croissant, bagel, and French bread and they all seem to be “good match”. The only bread I have is the oats-laden loaf from Gardenia (in partnership with Quaker, naturally :p).

As you can see in the photo, it is a very small round of brie with rind. This particular brie is not “oozing”; it does not have that spreadable consistency of the brie that I had years ago. I was thinking if the brie was heated in the microwave or oven for a few seconds the insides will melt, hence giving that “ooze” consistency similar to spreadable cream cheese (or Kraft Cheez Whiz hehe). In any case, the taste is the same. What I like about brie is it’s not salty and not sharp. It’s not overpowering and best of all, it does not smell.

I am quite adventurous when it comes to food but there are things that can really be so disgusting that putting them in my mouth is out of the question.  If you watch Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods, you’ll have a fairly good idea of how one country’s food can be another’s poison and you’ll know where to draw the line. Zimmern says  there’s a psychological barrier that prevents us from trying out foods that are very different from what we are accustomed to consuming. He has a point, but I need that barrier in certain situations – perhaps in an awkward situation where a host offers me a generous serving of Maggot Cheese on my toast.

I am not a cheese person but I’d try the stinkiest cheese around. However, a tub of cheese with creepy crawly maggots dancing and putting their tails up in the air like they just don’t care….may be a little too much for my stomach to take. There’s just some things that I am not keen on trying. But then again between bungee jumping and the maggot cheese eating, I might be crazy enough to do the latter.

Italian Maggot Cheese or Casu Marzu, as the name suggests, is a maggot-infested cheese that is eaten in Sardinia. Gordon Ramsay featured this in his show, F-Word. Watch it here.

If you are too lazy to watch, then let me summarize:

1. Fresh milk from the sheep is used to make Pecorino cheese

2. Cure for 3 weeks

3. Invite the flies to lay their eggs in the cheese

4. Cheese is left for 2 to 3 months in a dark cool hut to allow the eggs to hatch into larvae

5. Eat

It certainly is not for the usual bunch of foodies and only the most curious would dare subject himself/herself  to the dangers of eating maggots. Would you eat something that eats you back?

This sounds like the ultimate trashy food. They are fine on their own but when mixed together, that’s a totally different story. But that’s not to say I will not try it. It’s interesting enough to make me take one bite or two. Heck, if it’s good, I might order one more. Just a warning though: EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

SOURCE: Flickr ccaviness.