Fotos before Friday: in which I sing the praises of Halloumi cheese 6 December 2007 9:10 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cheese, cooking, eating, salad, sundance, tea, vegetarian, work , trackbackThis post is dedicated to Jonathan, who was a little grossed out upon overhearing Peter’s half of tonight’s dinner plan phone conversation, but I won’t hold it against him; he takes mighty fine pictures. Anyway…
It’s been more than a year since I resigned from running the Sundance cheese department, and that was a few months after the last (and fortunately first and only) time the walk-in cooler broke down on my watch. When this happened (and it happened at least twice during my time at Sundance), the cheesehead (I did love my title, though I also went by cheesebeast) would recruit a helper or two, and a few shopping carts, which would be used to take all the back stock out of the cheese cooler to the walk-in fridge in the warehouse. If the cooler hadn’t been broken for too long, all the cheese in the displays could be moved as well. That was the case when the cooler went down on my watch (because we checked it obsessively and moved quickly when the temperature had been in “the danger zone” of above 40 degrees F for more than an hour). However, the other time I was present at Sundance for a deli walk-in failure, someone came into the deli in the morning and discovered that the cooler was at 50 degrees F — and had no way of knowing how long it had been too warm. In this case, to be on the safe side (and because doing otherwise would be a health code violation), none of the cheese that had been in that cooler overnight could be sold. The cheese worker that day spent it weighing all the cheese that was deemed no good, writing a long list of product lost, and filling the cooler’s free food shelf, over and over again. All the cheese eaters at Sundance that day made out like bandits.
What does this have to do with Halloumi cheese, you may ask? Well, if my memory serves me, the package of said cheese recovered from the back of our fridge tonight had been residing there ever since the first great cheese cooler failure of 2006, which took place very early that year, January to be exact, not long after the New York Times article that taught me all about Sexy Mac and Cheese. For those of you playing the home game, that’s almost two years. (The expiration date on the package clearly states: BEST BEFORE END JANUARY 2006.) I believe the package of Halloumi we ate tonight was the second of two such packages recovered from the events of January 2006. It was definitely the very last remnant of those freebies — the rest having been either eaten in the first month after the disaster, or frozen and used later if they were good for melting (frozen and thawed cheese has a weird texture, but that doesn’t matter if you cook it, since that completely changes the texture, too). According to the package, Halloumi can be stored refrigerated or frozen, but somehow in two years that latter option had never occurred to me, and so the cheese sat, neglected and forlorn, in the back of the fridge. Until tonight.
Here’s the magic thing about Halloumi: it only barely melts. This means you can skewer it like a chunk of vegetable (or meat, if that’s how you roll) and cook it over fire without it dripping into the grill. It also means you can fry it in a pan just like you would tofu cutlets, and that’s what I did with the Halloumi we ate tonight. It turns golden brown and crispy on the outside, but stays light and firm on the inside, and it is delicious. Delicious, it turns out, even after sitting in the fridge for almost two years past its official “best-by” date. Awesome! This, my friends, is what cheese is for — to make it so that we can keep milk for a good, long time, deliciously. Yay!
Anyway. I should maybe have mentioned this sooner, but Halloumi is a sheep’s milk cheese from Cyprus. It is something like a firm mozzerella in texture, with the salty, brine-y goodness of a sheep’s milk feta, only not quite so tart. As previously mentioned, it can be cooked without melting, and that’s pretty neat. I suspect you could use it a bit like paneer, if that’s how you roll, but it’s quite wonderful in Mediterranean-inspired dishes of all kinds. For instance, tonight I made Couscous with Sundried Tomatoes from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home because it is quick and easy and delicious. I was going to top it with crumbled sheep’s milk feta when the Halloumi caught my eye, and the results turned out a bit like so:
Yum. But then I was craving something green, and anyway we’re going out of town for the weekend and if I hadn’t used the last of our lettuce it might have gone bad:
Super yum! Now, last time I checked Sundance stopped carrying Halloumi some time before I took the cheese throne in 2006, because it wasn’t a very good seller and it kept reaching its “best by” date before it sold out, but check your friendly local well-stocked cheese departments and let me know if you see it around; I’m curious! And if that doesn’t work, well, the fine folks at Iraila would be happy to sell you a delicious Halloumi salad appetizer, oh yes.
Finally, no matter how you decide to try Halloumi (if at all — sorry, vegans! Maybe someday I’ll figure out a way to fake it with firm tofu and brine!), I highly recommend accompanying it with a cup of hot green tea with mint. Enjoy!
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