New cheese cart @ Oru
“Chef, are all these cheeses from the Pacific Rim?”
“don’t worry about it.”
“but chef, it looks like they’re all French. are they local?”
“don’t worry about it.”
“chef, where’s Savoie?”
“ok, we’re done here- go clean all the walk-ins “
kidding, of course 😉 we’re all about local, but sometimes you just have to do the right thing, and for me, a cheese cart is incomplete without a few French touches…
so, these are some of my favorites – going from left to right- Tomme de Savoie- (French Alps, cow’s milk, heavy rind, buttery), P’tit Basque- (French Pyrenees, sheep’s milk, firm and nutty), Morbier- (Franche-Compté, cow’s milk, semi-firm, creamy with a layer of ash) and Reblochon- (the crown jewel of Haute-Savoie, creamy-nutty young cow’s milk cheese, the key ingredient to the regions “tartiflette” that I pretty much lived on for years, lol)…
moving closer to home, I have the Saltspring Island Juliette Blue (beautiful , delicately blue goat’s cheese), Moonstruck‘s awesome Ash Camembert (super creamy, little bit blue too), and the famous Brie from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks– (soft, clean and silky)
and then back to France for the super stinky, gooey, Époisses de Bourgogne, probably my all-time favorite… (top right corner- needs a spoon, lol) … Époisse is washed in Marc de Bourgogne, the local brandy, before ripening, and was one of the first really obnoxiously smelly but beautiful cheeses I tried on my first trip down from Paris to the Cote D’Azure through the Bourgogne Valley, and it’s stuck with me ever since…
I specifically remember stumbling on a little bed and breakfast just outside of Nuits-Saint George, run by a husband and wife- it was just the two of them and a huge wood burning hearth with a whole lamb turning on a spit, and they fed me Époisse and crusty bread while we all waited for that lamb to cook, lol. After dinner, they left me with a bottle of Marc, went to bed, and told me the keys to the inn were in the flowerpot by the front door, lock up after myself, and they’d check me in in the morning… all around great memories…
so anyways, come and see me for some stinky cheeses 😉