Scottish Salmon & French Cheese
Fish Friday 2:
Loch Duart Scottish Salmon
For this second Fish Friday of Lent, Rory, at our Colfax store in the photo above, would love for you to partake of Loch Duart Scottish salmon, and for good reason. (We don't carry Loch Ness Scottish monster because that's just creepy.) This spectacular salmon is sustainably raised in pristine waters off the coast of northwest Scotland. The farms were designed around the needs of the fish: LOTS of room for swimming around, and feed that reflects what they eat in the wild. These are the closest you'll find to immaculate, wild-caught salmon.
LOCH DUART SCOTTISH SALMON
$29.99/lb
How We Do Cheese: A Photo Essay
We receive many of our cheeses in big wheels or blocks that we break down ourselves. Below is a future-prize-winning photo essay that shows you how we prepare many of our cheeses, and we'll be demonstrating with a soft French cheese that has been a favorite for years.
1. Le Fromager, a French double cream cheese made by Fromager d'Affinois, starts out its adult life as a wheel just looking to make its way in the world. This is how we receive Le Fromager.
Even though it's not a brie, you'll be wondering, "Why the heck isn't Le Fromager a brie?" when you eat it. It is a double cream cheese, though: Enough extra cream is added to bring the butter fat content to 60%, measured by the dry content in the cheese, as if all the moisture had been removed — the actual fat content in the finished cheese is closer to 35%.
2. Now for the slicing. Firstly, we use this piano-wire-like slicer thing (Luca Brasi is not a fan), which we tune to E-flat, to cut the wheel in half. Wait until you see what's inside.
3. THAT is some glorious double cream cheese. When first formed into wheels, Le Fromager has more solidness to it, but after it ages the inside becomes gooey and wonderful and acquires immense creaminess and butteriness. It's never not wonderful breaking open a fresh wheel and seeing this.
4. Next we slice each half of the wheel into wedges, because who besides your cheese-snarfing neighbor Randy is going to buy an entire half wheel of soft French cheese?
5. Once it's all cut into wedges, we wrap them and put them out for sale for you — YOU, who will take precisely .04 seconds after the first taste to fall madly in love with this cheese.
This is one of those cheeses that is stupid-good, so stupid-good that after eating it you'll have the thought "what was I thinking eating so much of that cheese?" dueling with the thought "I want so much more of that cheese." Trust that second thought. Always trust that second thought.
Fromager d'Affinois
$21.99/lb
(but you don't have to buy a whole pound — but you'll probably want to)