Quotation of the Day

[shewhomust]

The ultimate salad cheese is feta, not parmesan; parmesan works with everything, whereas feta is like an awkward adolescent that keeps falling out with everyone, until it finally finds a youth club (cucumbers) where it can really be itself.

Zoe Williams is in search of the perfect salad, and doesn't she put it beautifully?

Not that I agree with her. I don't even understand her basic assertion: How can feta be the ultimate salad cheese if its use is so limited? If anything, it's the other way round: parmesan is fine in a Caesar salad, but not otherwise. Feta is brilliant with pulses: with lentil and beetroot, or chick peas and tomatoes and olives... With cucumber, it's good in a lemony Greek salad (tomatoes and olives again) but if all you have is cucumber, go for a tangy goat's cheese instead.

Mmm, cheese...

Comments

[cmcmck]

The ultimate salad cheese for me is pretty much any blue cheese- Wrekin blue if one is being localist! :o)

Mixed leaves, halved cherry toms, blue cheese, walnuts and golden raisins!

Yum!

[shewhomust]

Good point: there are some excellent salad combinations involving blue cheese. Also some that don't work at all, for me. I think of blue as too distinctive - and often too assertive - to provide the all-purpose solution suggested here.

[cellio]

Well, if we're expanding beyond salads, parmesan is also quite tasty as part of parmesan-coated anything, melted on top of fish, as part of eggplant parmesan, and in pasta, among others.

But yeah, that "perfect cheese" combined with the "awkward adolescent" thing is confusing -- can't be both.

In some salads I'm fond of goat cheese. I know that feta is *a* goat cheese, but I mean the silkier, less-salty varieties, sometimes just called chevre.

[shewhomust]

Parmesan as a sort of all-purpose savoury seasoning? Yes, I'd go with that!

You remind me that one reason feta is so versatile is that the name does cover a variety of styles: mostly here we get the older, stronger blocks, but young it can be fresh and curdy, much more like your (French style?) chèvre - and it can be made with sheep's milk, goat's milkj, or a mixure, which also affects that taste.

I don't disagree with you, though!