Cheese of the Week: Camembert de Portneuf

On the back of this attractively-wrapped cheese, it reads, in French and English:

My soul belongs to Portneuf, yet my heart belongs to cheese. Seeking inspiration from the countryside around me, I lovingly craft shapes and mosaics of flavours. My gourmet cheeses embody temptation and the charms of days gone by.

Sounds like a seductive little cheese wheel, doesn’t it? And yet, we’d tested a few cheeses of the Camembert and Brie variety recently, and we’d been getting some flack from fans who thought we needed to do something a little more interesting than just waste the cheeses with old Triscuits and soda crackers. So we thought we’d take this plain-Jane Camembert and tart her up a bit.

Internet recipe to the rescue!

We found a trillion that called for baking the cheese, but we weren’t in that mood. We wanted something less hot and more cheesy — something we could still cut up and serve on a cracker. So we found this one:

Ingredients:

• 1-pound wheel Camembert
• 3 tablespoons minced sun-dried tomatoes, rehydrated
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 4 tablespoons butter, very soft
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• Handful of chopped fresh parsley

1. Chill the cheese, then cut it in half like you’d slice a bagel.
2. Mince the tomatoes and garlic together till they are almost like mush.
3. Mix the butter, tomatoes, and garlic together, then stir in the chopped nuts.
4. Spread the mixture on the bottom layer of Camembert—it’ll be about 1/2 inch thick. Press the top layer down and neaten up the edges. (Smear a little of the mixture on the sides so the parsley will stick.)
5. Roll the sides in chopped parsley, wrap and refrigerate. To serve, let the cheese come to room temperature and serve with bread or crackers.

We set to work finding the ingredients (two days’ work — don’t search for recipes online after 6 p.m. on a Sunday) and then we set to work making the appetizer.

Mincing the tomatoes, crushing the walnuts and mixing them together with the butter and garlic was both easy and difficult. Although we thought that a chunky mixture might have more eye and mouth appeal, if we ever make this recipe again, I might try a food processor — not to puree anything, but to have things minced quite a bit more finely.

The oil that most sundried tomatoes come packed in, by the way, might replace a lot (or all) of the butter. There’s a serious over-abundance of butter in this recipe.

After spooning the tomato-walnut mixture between the halves of the cheese “sandwich” and putting them back together, we chopped the parsley and rolled the wheel of cheese in the green stuff. This did not work as advertised — but chopping parsley is hard!

Although it certainly looked festive, the photo doesn’t really get across how large this wheel of cheese became. With all the tomatoes and walnuts stuffed in the middle, it’s a very thick appetizer. Cutting a wedge out of it, like we did, is nearly like cutting a small cake — it’s that big. Alternatives might be to spread the mixture on each half of the cheese and then leave it open-faced, perhaps, but that’s not what we did. Nope, we followed the recipe directions. What rubes!

See what I mean?! That’s a gigantic hunk of cheese, right there! That’s near-impossible to get in your mouth, unless you really want to wrestle it in there. It’s not pretty, forcing an appetizer that big on your guests. It’s really quite unappetizing.

But what really matters was the taste. So how was the taste test?

In one word: ohmygodawful!

We ruined what was probably a perfectly good Camembert with this recipe. Although the sundried tomatoes and walnuts might have been a nice flavour combination with the relatively mild cheese, everything was destroyed in the throes of the mighty parsley. But even that might have been tolerable — after all, just pick some of the leaves off — if we hadn’t had to gag down four tablespoons of butter!

Whoever wrote this recipe must spoon butter onto their morning cereal, enjoy a nice patty of restaurant butter in their coffee, and ask for extra butter with their baked potatoes — hold the potatoes.

Look, Camembert is already a pretty buttery cheese. There was no need to add more butter flavour. It was awful. It was tough to eat. In fact, this is the only cheese of the week that sat around in the fridge for over a week after we taste-tested it, waiting for hungry or unawares people to take a bite out of it. None of the other cheeses have lasted even a day.

Recipe? Fail. Next time, we’re sticking with the crackers.