The beginning of the Cheeseotopic era

Cheese. It simply does not matter what angle you view it from; historically, culturally, aesthetically or socially, it really is the best food. The variation in shape, size, colour, texture, taste, ingredients and aging is excellent to behold. As a result of these differentiations, the versatility of cheese has allowed for the concept of cheese making to become an art and a craft rather than a by-product of milk as it was seen for so long. Cheese is crafted in literally hundreds of countries. If one was to start on the west coast of the USA and travel east all the way to New Zealand in pursuit of cheese then the options would be endless. The word cheese obviously encompasses a huge range of products and one persons understanding of what cheese actually is will be the complete antithesis of another. There are cheeses producuced on a mass scale in huge factories that are distributed all over the world, there are cheeses made by the artisan hands of folk that own creameries and farms that are distributed all over the world. At the other end of the spectrum there are specialist cheeses which are unique to one particular farm and are produced on such a small scale that they are only sold to local vendors. To take this further, cheese is produced with milk from cows, sheep, goats, buffalo, reindeer, the milk can be raw, pasteurized, thermalized, cheese can be aged a few days to several years, it can be fresh, soft ripened, fresh aged, soft aged, semi soft, semi hard, hard, flavour added, it can be produced in tiny wheels that are a few ounces and wheels that weigh two hundred pounds, it can be cloth wrapped, cave aged, organic, lactose free, vegetarian etc etc. Despite the fact that the former sentence is terribly structured, the lack of punctuation simply tries to highlight the great variety involved in cheese production and I have only barely scraped the surface. The aim of this blog is not to be a cheese critic, I am hardly qualified enough to make such claims. It is simply an insight into some cheeses I eat! Now I'm off to sell (and eat) some cheese!