2nd Dec 2009: Le Brie and a Visit From Cedric

A friend from France visited me and he brought some delights from France! Brie cheese!!!
My first time trying it… Hope it doesn’t taste like blue cheese… :S
 
    
 
Cedric brought some hand picked wine… how nice! :D But I’m not a fan of red wine… So I had a bit of struggle trying to finish up my red wine.. :S
 

Brie Cheese was really good though… Brie is a soft cows’ cheese named after Brie,a province in France..
There is a layer of crusty white mould… Yes… mould…. It reminds me of the smell of ammonia from chemistry lessons back in school…
Adapted from Wikipedia:

Production

Brie may be produced from whole or semi-skimmed milk. The curd is obtained by adding rennet to raw milk and heating it to a maximum temperature of 37 °C (98.6 °F). The cheese is then cast into molds, sometimes with a traditional perforated ladle called a "pelle à brie". The 20 cm mould is filled with several thin layers of cheese and drained for approximately 18 hours. The cheese is then taken out of the molds, salted, inoculated with cheese mould (Penicillium candidum orPenicillium camemberti) and/or Brevibacterium linens, and aged in a cellar for at least four to five weeks.
If left to mature for longer, typically several months to a year, the cheese becomes stronger in flavour and taste, the pâté drier and darker, and the rind also darker and crumbly, and is called Brie Noir (Fr: black Brie). Around the Île-de-France, where Brie is made, people enjoy soaking this in café au lait and eating it for breakfast.^[1] Over-ripe Brie contains an unpleasant, excessive amount of ammonia, which is produced by the same microorganisms required for ripening.^[2]