With all the delicious red wine we’ve been drinking this winter, it’s always nice to have a little cheese on hand to top off the meal. While I do have lots of favorites, I have to admit that few things go with red wine as well as blue cheese. Chef Jerry Pellegrino told me, blue cheese is one of the more complicated cheeses to produce.
It seems there’s a lot of chemistry in every type of cheese you can make, but blue cheese takes it a step further. It’s actually an exercise in microbiology. If you’ve never heard about what blue cheese actually is, it may come as a shock to learn that those blue and green veins running through the cheese are molds. As in moldy bread or moldy fruit, but with one big difference! The mold we’re talking about is 100% safe and edible, it’s never going to hurt you, only make your taste buds happy. Now this is no ordinary mold: it’s called penicillium roqueforti. As the name suggests this mold is associated with the famous French cheese Roquefort. This is the original blue cheese, made back as far as the Middle Ages. The legend was that a shepherd boy was sitting in a cave having a sheep’s milk sandwich for lunch, saw a pretty girl across the field and chased after her. He put down the sandwich, and didn’t see it again for a few months, when he came back and found it covered in a blue mold. The legend doesn’t explain why he decided to eat it, but someone did and thought, “Hey, we’ve got something here”. So, like the first fellow to eat an oyster, we’re glad they did. But let’s get specific. How does the mold get into the cheese?
Turns out it’s there all along. Each cheese in the world uses a specific culture to produce its flavors and textures when added to the milk. Blue cheese cultures already include the specially prepared bacteria that will produce the mold. When the wheels are formed a cheesemaker will pierce the wheels with a needle which will create a channel that allows air to get to the bacteria. The bacteria which are aerobic, begin to grown and not only follow the channel, but spread little veins throughout the cheese.
That raises the question, does each type of blue cheese have its own culture? According to Jerry, yes, and more than that, there are often laws that dictate how and where and when the cheese can be made if it wants to call itself a particular brand name.
Many of those brand names are familiar to us. We’ve got Roquefort and Bleu d’Auvergne from France; Gorgonzola (sharp or sweet) from Italy; Shropshire and Stilton from England; and Maytag Blue from the US. Here in Maryland we have the famous Firefly Farms and Chapel’s Country Creamery blue cheeses as well.
We think blue cheese goes really well with fruit, like cherries, pears, apples and melons.
And then there are nuts: as in Port wine with Stilton, pears and walnuts. Which is a dessert of the gods!
And of course you see it crumbled up in salads, since it certainly does crumble well. It also melts well which is what you want for a creamy steak sauce, one of the classic pairings. It’s ability to melt under low heat means it can be added to batters or casseroles to give the dish that wonderful pungent kick. And the key to all recipes is to throw in the blue cheese towards the end of the cooking so that it keeps its flavor and doesn’t melt to the point of breaking down.
Other ideas? Well, we’ve seen blue cheese with burgers; blue cheese dip; blue cheese in salads with beets and bacon; and of course, Buffalo wings sauce.
Here’s a recipe for making a great blue cheese steak sauce.
Classic Blue Cheese Steak Sauce
(For best results, use the same skillet you used for the meat.)
Ingredients
1/4 cup white vermouth
1 tbs unsalted butter
1 medium shallot, chopped finely
2 cloves of garlic, minced
½ cup heavy cream
½ cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
salt and white pepper to taste
Process
1. Working with the skillet you used for the steak, scrape up the brown bits from the bottom and deglaze with the white vermouth.
2. Over medium heat, melt the butter and sauté the shallots first, then the garlic quickly.
3. Pour in the heavy cream and bring to a simmer. As it thickens, stir in the blue cheese and the Worcestershire sauce. Keep stirring until the cheese is melted and the sauce smooths out.
Season to taste and serve right away.
