Sunday, March 21, 2010

A heavenly Stinker

The truffle season officially over I still had one of Provence's “black diamonds” (an especially generous gift) squirreled away in my freezer. And we had especially nice friends for dinner. And I had always wanted to try out this “truffeled Bried” I'd so often heard about. Also we have this famous cheese shop  in our town that, rumor has it, even delivers cheeses to such far away places as Rajastan when some Maharajah's daughter gets married.

So there I went and good thing I did. Turns out you can't do this with just a quarter of a Brie as I had in mind. And a Brie is just too big if you don't want to feed say twenty five people.

So Josiane, the cheese lady, recommended a Coulommiers instead, which I bought on Tuesday. At home I cut in in half horizontally, grated my well brushed truffle, mixed it up with some mascarpone and carefully spread this on the bottom part of the cheese. You then carefully set the other half of the cheese on top and wrap the whole thing tightly in cling film. I left it in the fridge until Thursday night, left it at room temperature until Friday late afternoon, then discarded the cling film and let the cheese breathe. You should have smelled my kitchen – the truffle had permeated the cheese which had started to run a bit....



I served it with a rustic, crunchy Baguette de Campagne (and a real good red wine of course) and see what was left after eight people were served seconds. Somehow I think they liked it....
 
 





4 comments:

  1. Oh, this looks delicious! I wish I had such a treasure in my freezer. I've been having fun experimenting with cheese lately as well and I've got to STOP. I won't fit into my summer clothes! I've wanted to post my recipes and photos but I've discovered that the cheeses I've been using are not available in the U.S (due to fairly recent prohibitions) where most of my readers are. It's too bad...the cheeses here are so delicious and smelly!

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  2. Are they ever! As I said: a heavenly stinker!

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  3. What a treat!What lucky friends you have. ;)

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  4. I love the smelly cheese places~the "smelly-er", the better! There is nothing better than the French Cheeses.....I pack as much as i can in my suitcase when I leave France, you can only imagine how my suitcase smells when I arrive home.

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