Over the weekend, Anne and I drove out to Draeger's in San Mateo, where we spent almost four hours perusing the shelves and examining the fine print of every alien object we came across. Next to the cheese counter, in the charcuterie, we discovered... goat milk butter (beurre de lait de chevre)! Of course, we had to buy some of our own. When the cashier rang it up as $9.95, we both flinched, but decided to soldier on, in the name of the cheese diaries.
I had been home for no more than ten minutes when the phone rang. It was Anne. "Dude, have you tried the butter yet?" I hadn't. "Um, it smells really good, but uh... mine is kind of moldy." I pulled mine out of the refrigerator, and gingerly peeled back the foil wrapper. Lo and behold, there lay several fine mold colonies. Not a few specks here and there, but deep roquefort-like caverns, valleys and fissures. Anne was right, though. It smelled really good. Like roquefort, and goat cheese. Bravely, I took hold of a knife, and cut myself a tiny sliver of the pure white part. It was salty, sweet, tangy, and fatty, with a distinctive blue cheese chevre flavor - delicious. As much as I love blue cheeses though, I couldn't bring myself to eat the moldy parts. I was fairly certain that the butter wasn't supposed to be sporting penicillium roqueforti spores, so sadly (can you imagine what it would taste like melted and drizzled on hot steak?), it had to go back to the store.
Posted by connie at October 14, 2003 04:32 PM | TrackBack