The cheese ripening initiative
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At the beginning of September 2021, The Soft Protest Digest was invited to the Food Art Film Festival 2021, run by the Food Lab of the Jan van Eyck Academie. This year, the festival embraced locality. After more than a year of restrictions and keeping our distance, it was time to strengthen the ties with the city, the region, local chefs, beekeepers, and farmers.
Thus, at the beginning of August, Robin invited 10 people related to the Academie to keep samples of fresh cheese made from the same milk with same processing. With no information about the known ways to ripen cheese, they card for it for 1 month, using only their own judgment and fantasy. Starting from a local ingredient, this simple performance aims to envision how the slightest empowerment on food processing eventually increases food diversity and decentralisation.
- The participation to the festival was constituted by:
- 🎞🎥The screening of the short film Landscape, soil, cheese and me (~10min), a one month cheese-making routine.
- 🎞🧀A tasting of the participants’ cheeses and the screening of a short video (~6min) where the cheese-keepers tell visitors about the cheese they cared about.
Production of the cheeses
The keepers and their cheeses
Cheese keeper | Cheese keeping process | Pictures | Taste and aspect |
---|---|---|---|
Aliki | Cheese kept in its box with lavender strands around it. Dried regularly by opening the box with the net. | Aliki’s care gave us a very soft and creamy paste, with a delicate taste including a discreet lavender perfume. | |
Arvid | Cheese wrapped in fennel leaves from an organic community garden. Kept in paper in box with leaking whey. | Under a smelly and humid skin of paper, rind and fennel, we found a very soft and runny paste with strong pikant character to eat on bread with jam. | |
Asli | After a bit of ageing in box, the cheese was sprinkled with kōji[1]. It was then kept in a plastic sleeve. | No informations available yet. | |
Ben | Cheese kept in open box with net. Brought by the windows’ light when sunny. | Among all the cheeses ripened, this one spent more time in the Sun, resulting on a dry and granular paste. It tasted quite like old hard cheeses like Parmigiano, thanks to the salts concentration. | |
Elisa | Kept wrapped in its paper in the box. | After removing the sticky paper, we found a moist and runny cheese that Elisa was afraid to eat, but it turned out that its taste was soft and creamy, and she liked it! | |
Fazal | Cheese was covered with coriander/carom seeds and curry leaves. Kept in open box with net. | The strong perfume of curry leaves balanced well the salty taste of the crumbly paste, punctuated with crispy seeds. | |
Ignace | Cheese was washed every week with Belgian sour beer. Flipped every 2 days and kept in moist basement. | “It tastes like a combination of cheese and my basement!” From the first look, its rind and paste looked gorgeous: not runny nor too firm, with a nice orange colour that happen to taste slightly sour and tannic. | |
Morgane | |||
Robin | |||
Wim |
One of the cheeses was also brought to the Maas’ shore to be given as an offering.
Gallery
- ↑ Aspergillus oryzae, also known as kōji mold, is a filamentous fungus used in East Asia to saccharify rice, sweet potato, and barley in the making of alcoholic beverages such as sake and shōchū, and also to ferment soybeans for making soy sauce and miso.