Charcuterie and cheese requires little effort
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- May 25, 2018
- 1163
One of the things I most enjoy eating involves no cooking at all and very little prep time. It also fulfills our calling to eat well and cheaply.
In fancy terms it's called charcuterie, which in literal translation from the French is “meat cooked.” The word we would swap out in English is delicatessen or deli. Here, our language once again finds itself trailing behind French in the expressiveness department.
It refers to a collection of preserved meats, often pork, and comes to us from the time before commonly available refrigeration.
Usually a couple times each week, we put together a charcuterie board, normally with a few slices of soppressata, an Italian-preserved salami packing a great deal of flavor, some shavings of smoked salmon, some crusty bread, some cured olives, a few cheeses and some herbed extra virgin olive oil for dipping.
The only effort involved is in slicing things and arranging them on a plate or board. Somehow I’ve managed to collect numerous such fancy cheese boards and tiny knives as gifts in the past couple of years, so there’s always one handy. With the exception of the salmon, these are all things you can wrap up for next time and end up with very little money spent over two or three meals.
It’s an easy thing to do for dinner when you plan to skip the dining room to catch up on binging whatever streaming television content everyone is talking about at the moment. It’s also super easy to clean up afterward.
For cheeses, I’m trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to drop ordinary brie from the mix. Once you’ve baked it, it doesn’t keep very well for a reheating, and we always end up throwing half of it away.
My great cheese discovery of 2018 is actually two: double and triple cream, which are more creamy, fattier versions of brie. I’m diligently trying to get local food markets to stock more of both, but you’ll have to help me out here by buying some. It seems that many of us are unfamiliar with double and triple cream cheeses, so they apparently tend to expire before being purchased, leading retailers to limit supply.
They are both cheeses to which extra cream is added before the curd is formed. The result is a very soft, spreadable cheese that is very high in butterfat: double cream at 65-70 percent and triple cream at least 75 percent or even higher.
Here’s where the technical stuff lets you off the indulgence hook: Cheesemakers refer to butterfat in the dry solids of the cheese. Double and triple cream cheeses are young (not aged for a long period) and have a very high moisture content, as much as 50 percent. So all that butterfat is held in just 50 percent of the cheese.
Parmesan cheese, by contrast, is much denser with more fat in dry matter and less moisture, making a soft, moist cheese with intentionally pumped up butterfat content less scary for those who pay attention to such things. That’s the rationalization I’m sticking with.
And these cheeses are so remarkably smooth, creamy and delicious that I really don’t care if they’re fatty. They don’t need to be baked, and the rind left on the outside is quite delicious with none of the gym locker funk I often get with brie.
It’s up to us, fellow foodies, to keep urging our suppliers to bring us something different. When you’re surrounded by every possible variety of Swiss cheese and chip-chop ham, having something well off the Amish Country path in the grocer’s case from time to time is a major culinary blessing.