We’re pleased to help you extend your Spanish food knowledge with this information. Of course, we’d love to welcome you at the online store where you can buy the authentic Spanish cheeses you’ve read about here. Just a suggestion…
In the world food game, getting a ‘name’ for a product is a gold-mine. I’m not talking about regular ‘brands’, like Coca-Cola or Danone, whose perceived superiority is supported by million-pound advertising campaigns and class-leading branding and marketing. I’m talking about the subtler, sub-conscious dominance of geographical ‘world brands’, like wines from Champagne or La Rioja or cheeses like Feta or Manchego.
Mostly, these brands arise from a recognised historical tendency for specific areas to excel at the production of a specific product, be it wine, cheese, rice or biscuits. Slowly, the area becomes synonymous with the product, like La Rioja for Spanish red wines. Recently, in the commercial era, is has become the norm for producing areas to try to cement their competitive advantage and exclude newcomers to the market by establishing various types of quality standards, producers’ associations and marks of guarantee of origin – in Spanish food production the ‘Denominacion de Origen’ (DO) applied to hundreds of different products, from wine to artichokes, from beans to turron.
The DO is mostly positive for the consumer, encouraging good standards in production and protecting against falsely labelled products. However, the efforts of DO’s, producers associations and local export consortiums to promote their brand can have an overall negative effect on consumer psyche, compounding the idea that only one type of product is worth buying and limiting the perceived choice. In the UK, where Spanish food is only just starting to make a name for itself, consumers tastes stray little from the well-known classics – wine is from La Rioja, cheese is Manchego, everything else is chorizo. But times, tastes and production methods change and what may have been the best (or only) product 200, 100, 50 or 25 years ago, may no longer be. It’s time to start ignoring the historical bias and branding and start looking for real quality.
So let’s start by dispelling some myths. Don’t get me wrong, Manchego cheese is excellent. Some Manchegos may be amongst Spain’s best cheeses. But it’s not the only, or necessarily even the best variety that Spain produces. It’s just one, specific type of cheese among hundreds, if not thousands of other varieties that are worthy of your tastebuds’ attention. In fact, in most of the round-ups and cheese contests I’ve seen, Manchegos don’t dominate, or even win. And the Spanish don’t actually eat that much of it. Many of the Spaniards I know tasted Manchego for the first time in England. Furthermore, the supermarket shelves in Spain don’t heave with Manchegos, in fact it’s quite the opposite.
What makes Manchego cheese special? Primarily, it is produced from 100% ewes milk from a particular breed indigenous to La Mancha (an area in central Spain, south of Madrid). To meet the DO requirements, producers must adhere to strict quality guidelines and minimum curation times, and obviously, the cheese can only be produced in La Mancha. Under current guidelines, both pasteurised and unpasteurised milk is acceptable. The best resulting Manchegos are exquisite – a long curation gives a hard, crumbly texture and a intense, almost spicy taste, typical of a ewes milk cheese.
But wherever you look in Spain, you’re never far away from a prizewinning sheeps milk cheese. Some of the best come from Extremadura, Zaragoza and Leon and are comparable to the greatest Manchegos in taste, texture and quality. They are available in every conceivable curation – from soft and fresh to solid and pungent and are often far more reasonably priced. Then there are mixed milk varieties – the definitive Spanish cheese. Available as a mixture of cows, sheeps and goats milk, and in varying proportions, the semi-cured mixed cheese is perhaps the Spanish equivalent of our own cheddar and is the nation’s top cheese for every day consumption. Go to any supermarket and well over half the cheese section is devoted to the ’semicurados’. But the style is far from average, especially to UK palettes. The mixture of three different milks produces a cheese with a very distinctive taste that can’t be found in any other type of cheese and is rare outside Spain. Finally, the Spanish regions produce a vast array of speciality cheeses like the powerful blue cheeses of Valdeon and Cabrales, the almost liquid Torta de Casar from Extremadura and many fine matured goats cheeses.
I’d love to go through this process of dispelling myths for other Spanish products, but suffice to say that there are many, many superb wines produced outside La Rioja and a huge assortment of excellent cured meats that aren’t chorizo. Time to start experimenting!
