Your dinner has been a screaming success, the meal you spent hours on has been greeted with the right amount of "oooohs, argghs" and "how did you make the sauces?". The only thing left is the cheeseboard and what to serve with it!
Before I go on I must put a point of view out here. Traditional French cooking is my usual start point for all things food related and in France they would generally have the cheese course before the pudding and in many ways this is a good idea. However, I think this is one of those things that we Brits get right. A good cheese board is the perfect grazing plate and, when served at the end of the meal, allows everyone to relax and chat on into the small hours whilst helping themselves to little mouthfuls.
Let us first deal with what a good cheeseboard looks like: Primarily, you do not need 14 cheeses on your board. A maximum of 4 different cheeses is all that is required. This will not only make your shopping simple but also mean that you can buy large enough lumps of cheese to make for good keeping.
Moving on to the carbohydrate: Bread or crackers are both fine. Normally I would make the decision based on what has happened in the meal previously. Balance is everything here. For this board I chose crackers, specifically, Stockan's Oatcakes and Miller's elements Ale (which contain hops). Again, don't feel the need to put 25 different types of crackers on the board, you will simply end up with 25 stale half packs three weeks later.
The other bits on the board are really up to personal choice; though classics would include dried fruit, celery sticks and nuts.
The cheeses I chose were as follows
- Snowdonia Black Bomber
- St Marcelin
- Highmoor
It is very easy to fall back on old friends like Port and Madeira though be careful around red wines as often they are a poor match for cheese ( I promise you this is the case). However, this is all about beer so to beer we must look.
Trappist beers are are made within monasteries. Not only do they have to be made in specific holy places but the Monks must be involved in the brewing. This is monitored very strictly and often producers are removed from the list, so it is very difficult to give an exact number of Trappist breweries at any given time. Suffice to say, it's around 15. I must also emphasise at this point that "Trappist" isn't a style of beer it simply denotes the location and the manpower involved.
Westlmalle Dubbel is one of the more available Trappist beers with quite large production. It is very dark brown with a reddish tint. It kicks in at 7% so its not for the faint hearted. It uses secondary fermentation in the bottle and produces a light brown head of foam. On the nose it has a lot of fruit and spice with herbal hints. (almost a dandelion and burdock smell, honestly). On the palate it is rich and sweet with more dried fruit flavours. There is a very clear malt spine in the beer, rich and like wholemeal bread. The finish is both bitter and dry without being too much.
I was very pleased with how it matched the cheese and would happily do this match again.
No comments:
Post a Comment