MONITOR:Beware cheddar that has been chemically engineered to tingle your tastebuds, writes HUGO ARNOLD
SPOOFING IS SOMETHING we used to do at school. Larking about is what my father called it. Kids’ stuff. So just before you bite into that piece of toast you are about to pick up, consider this. Spoofing is something happening all the time to what we eat. And the scary thing is that most of us don’t know it.
Spoofulation is a word used by some wine writers to describe a wine that, in essence, is mucked about with to become something it isn’t. An overuse of oak has long been a legitimate way of rounding out a wine, making it seem more smooth, ripe and rich. By the second glass, however, maybe you are not so sure.
Consider the rise of so-called upmarket cheddars, or the ability of sandwiches to stay moist as they travel through a chill-chain measured in kilometres, or the consistently attractive sweetness of some apples – all spoofulation.
Take the so-called cheddars. The image on the packet supports the view that all that natural milk from cows near an imagined village is responsible for the sweet, strong caramel flavour you are enjoying now.
Your pleasure is more likely to be the result of Lactobacillus helveticus, a powerful starter culture traditionally used in Swiss cheese-making. Some cheddar producers have found that a little of this starter combined with traditional cheddar starters produces a cheese that one maker describes as “appealing to both consumers and supermarkets alike”.
That toffee sweetness present in the likes of Gruyère, Emmental and Comté is something, apparently, we all would like a little of. Now, as if by magic, we can get it by paying a little more for an upmarket so-called cheddar.
This is the trouble with spoofing. It is all perfectly legal, but plays around with our own ignorance and understanding. What struck me, standing in west Cork recently watching one of our artisan cheeses being made, is the care and skill and love that goes into making good cheese.
And this is particularly the case when it comes to choosing and using a starter. You want the starter to do just that, start the process of bringing together what is inherently present in the precious milk.
Industrial cheese, of course, has none of this process in mind – it wants to make a cheese we want to eat from a veritable lake of milk. But is it cheese any more? How can we tell?
Inoffensive sweetness is part of our modern life – think air-fresheners and sanitisers. These used to be far more chemical smelling – think bleach and Dettol. Now we get a nasal diet of sugars. All of this mucking about is to try and ensure that what you eat is supposedly what you want and always entirely the same. You can only build a brand if the product is always the same. Which to my mind is not the same as consistent.
Durrus cheese is consistent. Consistently the same that is, but often widely different depending on who made it, who you buy it from, what time of year it is, how long it has been kept, and so on.
I like this kind of consistency. Sometimes I am a bit disappointed, sometimes I am ecstatic, often I am in the middle, happy to go on a gustatory journey of discovery knowing something of the terrain but happy to be surprised. It is what makes food fun.
Marie-Claire Digby returns with FoodFile next week
