As a food writer, I often am asked by people - and indeed journalists - what my latest new “find” is; which in many respects is the antithesis of how I believe food should be. New products and – worse – categories are almost always highly processed and generally not to be recommended to anyone.
The exception, of course, is new producers of familiar products, though as a professional Curd Nerd, who tastes, judges and writes about hundreds of cheeses a year, I tend to think I have a reasonable grasp of the best producers in the major cheeses.
That is until a new artisan comes along, who shakes up cheese making; think the sublime Ballylisk from Armagh, a genuinely new cheese with a rich bloom, and salty lemon notes cutting through cream; or you get to taste a cheese made by a long-standing artisan, but one you have never managed to taste before.
These tend to always come from overseas, where it is near impossible to have tasted every producer of every cheese, but where it’s possible to taste something which is both new and ancient and question why you have never tasted it before.
It would be fair to say that while everyone has tasted Gorgonzola, the quality of the product we have access to here in the UK, is generally poor compared to other Italian cheese. It is not uncommon for there to be rasping salt or flat monotonal flavour in examples in our supermarkets, and while good cheese shops and delis and the on-trade tend to fair better, the exceptional is still far from the norm.
Tosi Gorgonzola is that exception, a generations-old small producer from Piedmont; this cheese is so intensely creamy and rich it is served from a wooden box and eaten with a spoon, which is achieved by producing the cheese at a much lower temperature than is generally found.
Entered into the International Cheese Awards for the first time, it walked away with Gold, and in a concept, I want to see every producer replicate they have opened a Gorgonzola showroom in London’s Smithfield.
If I sound like a Curd Nerd Fan Boy, it’s because I am - but equally, it serves as a reminder to all of us in the hospitality trade that sometimes we need to revisit and refresh our existing products: do we have the very best that we can find?
Now, all I need to do is to find myself some cheese and a spoon.
