I'm a foodie. I like to cook and I love to eat. I enjoy experimenting with a variety of cuisines, textures, and flavors. When I think about what I don't like to eat, there are only two common items that end up on my plate with any regularity that I will avoid at all cost: green peppers and goat cheese. Green peppers suck. They overwhelm whatever dish they infiltrate, impart a foul taste, and then prompt you to taste them twice - sometimes hours later - through their mysterious burping properties. However, they can usually be removed from a Chinese dish with a flick of the chopstick, or surgically removed from a slice of pizza with a thumb and forefinger.For most of my adult life, the green pepper stood alone as my singular culinary enemy. That relative bliss changed about ten years ago when a once obscure variety of cheese began to make its way into mainstream cuisine: goat cheese. Once the strictly the provenance of Northern California trustafarian hippies, goat cheese has inexplicably oozed its way across the land like warm brie over a crostini. One theory is that while the hippies who bought farms in Marin County in the late 1960s knew that Imperialist America had to be destroyed, they didn't know shit about actual farming. Because cows are labor intensive (you have to wake before noon to tend to their needs), goats would be a far better option for this group. The hippies discovered that the goats could be milked much like cows, and while no one wants to drink their milk, it could be turned into a cheese and marketed as a gourmet product. Ultimately Alice Waters and some other Berkeley-based restaurateurs got wind (maybe literally) of what was happening across the Golden Gate and began serving this creation to aspiring eaters. Because they were dining at Chez Panisse, they would dare not question what they consumed.
For about the next thirty years, goat cheese was relegated to gourmet stores and high-end cheese shops, and maybe called for by the occasional recipe in Gourmet or Bon Appetite. But then it began turning up - first at wedding receptions - like the unwanted uncle. And now it won't go away.
Here are the main problems with goat cheese:
Its taste
Do people actually enjoy eating something that tastes like it was scraped from the bottom of a cloven hoof?
Its texture
It's mealy consistency clots and sticks to the roof of your mouth.
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| Two things that should never go together |
It's seen as a more sophisticated option
Why? As long as your cheese isn't pre-sliced and individually wrapped in cellophane, we won't judge you.
It's called chèvre - in English.We don't call cow's milk cheese vache, nor do use mouton to refer to sheep's milk cheese. It's over-the-top in its pretentiousness and that's unnecessary.
It masquerades and hides its identity.
That delicious slice of spinach and feta pizza. Those golden puffed layers of phyllo. Those crumbles on your salad. That crab cake next to your greens. Beware - they might all be goat cheese!
So please, bring brie. More manchego. Pass the parmesan. Just no more goat cheese, okay?
