LINKS: Rollin', rollin', rollin'

By Erica

Besides cheese, there's another (Madison) Wisconsin tradition that I love: festivals. Apparently, these two favorite pastimes of mine coexist in Gloucestershire, England.

In the Spring, the town gathers at Cooper's Hill for the annual Cheese-Rolling festival, which is exactly what you would imagine: a wheel of cheese is rolled down the steep hill, and the first person to catch the cheese and cross the finish line is the winner.



As popular as it is strange, the Cheese-Rolling festival had to be canceled this year because the organizers were concerned that the events growing number of spectators would be too much to handle. Maybe we'll start our own Cheese-Rolling festival here in Madison. Anyone know any good hills?



Original source: Time Magazine's Top Ten Quirky Local Festivals (Thanks, N.C.!)

TASTES: Rocastin Sheep Milk Brie

By Kara and Erica

A few months ago, we and a few other friends casually enjoyed a sheep milk Brie. Well, to the others it was casual. We, of course, knew we'd have to come back to contemplate it more seriously. Today's cheese is a French Rocastin Sheep Milk Brie from the Willy St. Co-op.

Background: Rocastin (also know as "Berger de Rocastin" and "Fromage de Brebis") is a French brie-style cheese, made with sheep's milk (hence the French references to shepherds and ewes). In general, Brie cheeses are distinguished by their soft and creamy texture and rich flavor - two cow's milk varieties are protected by the A.O.C. (Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun), and a wide array of Brie-style cheeses are available and extremely popular in the U.S. Brie cheese are often relatively young (4-5 weeks) and most easily recognized by their circular or wedge-like shape, their white, "bloomy" rind, and their oozingly creamy center.

There is very little information about Rocastin out there: most descriptions center on the "velvety rind," which is pretty typical for any Brie-style cheese. Rocastin is produced in the Rhone-Alps region of France. Immediately apparent differences between Rocastin and more common varieties of "Brie": sheep's milk and a triangular shape. (It's produced in a rectangular rather than a circular mold, leading us to wonder about the effects of corners on its taste...)

The Taste: Although we have a (possibly biased) soft spot for goat's milk cheese, this sheep brie is absolutely delicious. Like with goat's milk cheeses, though, it has grassy, earthy notes. We enjoyed this added complexity! In terms of texture, sheep milk brie is everything cow milk brie is, but to the extreme. The higher fat content in sheep's milk makes the cheese very rich and creamy. It's thick and sticks to the roof of your mouth (in a decadent--not disgusting--way).

If you love brie but are bored with the typical selections, try some sheep!

Sources:

Wikipedia: "Brie"

Cheeselibrary.com: "Fromage d'Affinois de Brebis"

LINKS: Eat cheese and be healthy

By Erica

A team of scientists in Finland, lead by Dr Fandi Ibrahim from the University of Turku, published a study in FEMS Immunology & Medical Microbiology that shows that probiotic cheese can help boost the immune system of elderly people. In the study, they fed people aged 72 to 103 either probiotic Gouda or a placebo cheese. They then took blood tests which revealed that those who ate the probiotic cheese had more activation of NK blood cells and increased phagocytic activity. These are both signs of a boosted immune system.

And so, if you are old and fear that your immune system is deteriorating, eat probiotic cheese!

LINKS: Cheese Wordles and Tagxedos

By Kara

Wordle.net is a website dedicated to transforming texts into images: it takes the count of each unique word in a given text (say, a cheese blog), and assigns visual "prominence" (size) to each word in the worlde based on these counts. Check out what we've been writing about on C:AJ:

Tagxedo.com is a Wordle spin-off, which offers more control over the visual display created.

Bottom line: so cool!! Also, we mostly talk about cheese. No false advertising on C:AJ.

LINKS: Cheese banned, boy cries

By Erica

A few days ago, a preschooler named Jack Ormisher was left in tears after a school official took his cheese sandwich away from him. Westfield Children's Centre, a school in Pemberton, England recently put together a list healthy eating options, and a cheese sandwich did not qualify as a healthy choice.

The parents withdrew Jack from the preschool and enrolled him elsewhere. Now that's good parenting!

LINKS: Cheese Dreams

By Kara

Yet another myth dispelled by rigorous modern science: contrary to popular (British) belief, cheese does not give you nightmares.

"For decades," according to the Daily Mail, "parents have warned their children not to have cheese before bedtime to prevent bad dreams."

Well, not my parents. But - thank goodness! - the newest generation of English would-be cheese-lovers will also be spared that old wives' tale, thanks to a 2005 study by the British Cheese Board. According to their research, consuming small amounts of cheese in the evening is correlated with experiencing a restful night's sleep, marked by an absence of nightmares. Cheese may even afford dreamers some control over their nocturnal experiences: in the study, different kinds of cheeses were reliably associated with different sorts of dreams, including celebrity cameos (Cheddar), bouts of nostalgia (Red Leicester), forward-thinking fantasies (Lancashire), and bizarre phantasmagoria (Stilton). (Source: Dairy Reporter.)

I stumbled upon these findings through a post on Yahoo Answers (UK & Ireland), which offers some other entertaining insights on the topic of cheese.

And lest we chalk this all up to those crazy Brits and their especially nutty old wives: NPR picked up the story, too.

To our readers:

Now that we've been traveling down Cheese Highway for a while, we've decided to put down the map and get a little adventurous: we're going to cook with cheese. Maybe your mouth watered while reading our last post about Mac and Goat Cheese, and you have some other cheesey recipes that you'd like us to try out. Or maybe you've always wondered how to cook or bake with a particular kind of cheese and want to see us take a stab at it. We'd love your suggestions, whatever they are - and let it be known that we at C:AJ will not restrict ourselves to the old standbys! Throw us your wackiest, cheesiest challenges (cheese ice cream, anyone?), and we'll see what we can do.

To suggest a recipe for us to try, email us at cheeseajourney@gmail.com.