Cheese and Wine Festival, South Bank
Cheese and Wine Festival, South Bank, 15th October
Cheese and wine both improve with age (as long as the quality is good enough). A newborn cheese is salty and bland, but the longer it matures the more intense the flavour. And the more intense the smell? It’s a strange thing to find alluring, the smell of cheese. But the air around South Bank was definitely ripe with it today. You know cheese is one of the few foods that is improved by bacteria and mold. Fruit and meat rots, but cheese matures.
There were lines of market stalls offered free tasters (I have an excellent eye for try me – buy me’s) and expert advice. One cheese connoisseur advertised a goat’s cheese he was selling as 12 days old and not being sure of whether that was a good thing I asked how long until it’s at its best. For me… probably a year. Cheese and wine have more in common than the ageing process: like a good red wine a cheese is improved by allowing it to warm up and soften before it is eaten so that the flavours are liberated.
We also tried a number of other cheese-based delights. Particularly memorable was the cheesecake brownies being sold by Outsider Tart. We tried the choco cherry cheesecake brownie and the peanut cheesecake brownie and both had a delicious heavy cake like texture, with added creaminess and texture from the cheesecake that rippled through. We later caught the end of a cheesecake demonstration that the same company was doing in the Cookery Theatre (drawn in by the sight of more free samples).
Drowsy from the food, the sunshine and a refreshing drink from the Twisted Cider, we left the crowds and the raclette queues and wandered back to the river side to sit in the sunshine and watch the skateboarders practice their tricks in the bowels of the theatres.
Nightmares tonight? Actually, cheese as been found – in credible scientific test to induce sleep not interrupt it. So pre-bedtime snack I buttered some toast, covered it with slices of a mild goats cheese, drizzled it with runny honey and some generous cracked black pepper and left it under the grill until it was golden. And it was good, I can confirm that it was good.