We’ve had a lot of cheese made from cow’s milk and goat’s milk but proportionally less cheese made from sheep’s milk.
There have only been 2 others this year… on day 4 and day 16.
Not sure whether that proportionality holds for cheese-making in general or not – it’d be interesting to know, but I’ll save that exploration for another day.
Here’s what we thought of today’s sheep-milk cheese…
Day #21: Crottin de Brebis
- Name: Crottin de Brebis
The name of today’s cheese is kind of comical. Outside of a cheese context… crottin is a word describing the excrement of different animals. For example, back home, we’d sometimes refer to horse droppings as “horse muffins”. So it generally refers to a smaller but all the same bulky-ish shape of ‘droppings’… so here, it’s somewhat describing the shape, but has come to be associated with smaller forms of cheese that aren’t so much in ’rounds’, but are more informally shaped. - Region: Cher
- Milk: raw Sheep’s milk
- Our Score: 3.2/5
I’d say that, generally speaking, it was an OK cheese. If anything it was perhaps Timo’s score of ‘2’ that brought the overall score down to 3.2, but it did have a fairly strong-ish flavour (not un-typical of cheese made from sheep’s milk). Personally, I liked the texture but yeah… a bit on the strong side.
Cheese quote of the day
Another rather long cheese quote today. I prefer the shorter, more quippy ones, but this one won me over by (a) its wonderful descriptiveness, (b) its long list of cheeses and (c) the heroine’s French name: Miss Petitfour (French for ‘nibbles / appetizers / hors d’oeuvres’). It comes from Anne Michael’s book ‘The Adventures of Miss Petitfour”, a Mary Poppins-esque character and her 16 cats.
““When Miss Petitfour made a fancy salad, Minky watched the way the lettuce leaves bent under the slight weight of the Parmesan; when Miss Petitfour had cheese toast for tea, Minky noticed how the cheddar melted into every little crevice and crater of the toast. She licked her whiskers greedily when Miss Petitfour lowered her hand to feed her snippets and smidgens, pinches and wedges, slices and crumbs. Minky loved all cheese–Swiss cheese, Edam cheese, Gruyere and Roquefort, Brie cheese and blue cheese, mozzarella and Parmesan, hard cheese, crumbly cheese, creamy cheese, lumpy cheese. Minky even had a cheese calendar that she kept with, which Miss Petitfour had given to her for Christmas. Each month there was a big picture of a different kind of cheese in a mouthwatering pose: blue cheese cavorting with pears, cheddar laughing with apples, Gruyere lounging with grapes, Edam joking with parsley.”
Happy Cheesy Christmas….
See you tomorrow for cheese #22
AIM Long 