Ah, the first Cheese of the Week Challenge! A faithful reader had asked me if I could find him a good cheese for a hiking trip that he had planned. Well, none of the Bries or Borgonzolas I’ve reviewed in the past would really qualify as pack-me-in-your-backpack-and-leave-me-in-the-sun-for-a-week cheeses, so I thought I might use this opportunity to branch out a bit.
Amy and I spent last weekend camping for four days at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, so I knew I had a good opportunity to test out a hiking cheese in roughing-it conditions, but I also knew that I would probably be pressing my luck if I had asked Amy to let me do a stress test on, like, a dozen different cheeses to find the best one. Nope, I would have to find a good cheese and hope that it worked.
I knew from previous camping experiences that I would be looking for a fairly hard cheese. I wanted one that wouldn’t melt and go mushy in the heat of a tent (or a backpack). But it couldn’t be Parmesan hard — I needed a cheese that I could slice, not just grate. And, despite my fondness for some of the older cheddars, they have a disturbing tendency to sweat oil in the heat, and that made them no-go cheeses.
I’ll confess — I Googled. I found a lot of people recommending harder, aged Goudas and perhaps a sharp Jack cheese for outdoors expeditions, but on my own expeditions to grocery stores I found mostly processed Jack cheeses and Goudas that didn’t seem aged enough to last for four days on the trail.
Another suggestion was to take cheeses that were wax-covered. Those mini Babybel cheeses are an option, if you have loads of money. Other than that, cheeses that are fully covered in wax tend to be fairly large, and even the “baby” Edams are bigger than a softball. And, once you open the wax, I feared that they would quickly go downhill. Alternatively, if you have the right kind of wax and the right kind of patience, I found more than one place that instructed you to seal your own cheeses in your own wax. I was intrigued, but not that motivated, especially since they said that doing it wrong could allow mould to grow underneath the wax on your cheese.
After pressing cheeses in several grocery stores until I found one that was firm enough under my fingers to feel like it would stand up to the heat of the summer sun, and yet soft enough to be sliced, I settled on the Asiago cheese you see here. It’s the Safeway store brand, and I don’t know where it’s from or who made it originally, but it was pretty affordable. It stayed in our cooler for a couple of days, and it wasn’t very well cooled when we opened it. After that, it was on the warm side, and I can tell you that it withstood the temperature very well.
We decided to cook with it.
While pan-frying a couple of steaks and some perogies, as well as enjoying a plastic goblet of wine-from-a-box, we debated how exactly we would eat this cheese. To be honest, my primary experience with Asiago cheese comes from some pizza places and, I think, Subway, which includes Asiago on its cheese-sprinkled bread option.
You’ll notice a slight, oily sheen on the top, there, but it wasn’t very greasy, really. Amy says she didn’t even notice. Cutting into this cheese, you can see that a sharp knife will have no problem cutting off cubes or slices, although it does have a slight tendency to crumble or break near the bottom of each cut. It’s a fairly firm cheese, but definitely not overhard. I think it might be slightly more a grating cheese than a slicing cheese, but it’s really right at a nice sweet spot that makes it very flexible for the backwoods chef — at least from a physical manipulation sense. But how does it taste?
Mmmm, delicious! There is a slight rubbery, almost curds-like springiness to this cheese, but it’s nothing my adult chompers couldn’t handle with delight. The taste, now that we’ve come to this, is very much like Parmesan. Though less salty and a little less sharp, it’s an obvious cousin. You could use it in much the same way, if you grated it, on salads and pastas. But, of course, we weren’t making salad or pasta, we were making perogies and steak.
Melted on steak, the cheese was actually quite nice — it’s a very good melting cheese, in that it holds its shape well and isn’t too stringy.
We also sliced up a tomato to go with the cheese — and it was a great pairing. Wait, you want another close-up of my mouth to prove it? Ohhh, kaaay.
Mmmm, delish. I will also take this opportunity to point out my authentic “grizzled moutain man” stubble and to explain that the discolouration on my incisor is from the time I took a header off my bike while no-handsing in Grade 7 and now my half-dead tooth is barely held together with a spider’s web of cracks. But even that fragile enamel can slice through this Asiago with ease.
And, let me tell you that the Asiago-tomato combination works well. If had brought a little basil to sprinkle on top, I think it would have been delightful.
However, the cheese works so well melted, that I think if I were to, say, take it hiking, I would also make sure to take along maybe a baguette of bread, and with this cheese, a tomato and a campfire, you could make a darn fine toasted bruschetta.
Grant Hamilton
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