Fungus in your cheese ...

This happened in a small party in Singapore. One guy with a terrible cold and blocked nose took it and found nothing strange, one food loving chap took it with some initial surprise and difficulty but eventually finished it and the third could even swallow the first tiny mouthful of …….
The Blue Cheese of Roquefort(no points for guessing the food loving guy here..)

This is a special variety of strong smelling and tasting cheese, which can mean paradise for most French tongues and the paralysis of unsuspecting palettes from other countries. It’s not so difficult to understand such a reaction, if you can visibly see some grey-blue colonies of the fungi Penicillium Roqueforti eating through the insides of the cheese, in addition to the smell and strong taste. The earliest mention of this type of cheese was in 76AD loved by the Romans, and Casanova is said to have associated Roquefort cheese with Chambertin wine to seduce women! But since I have a special affinity to fatty food stuff of all kinds, this fromage (cheese) triggered my curiosity.

I visited the origin of this strange cheese, in a place called Roquefort, and in the insides of a set of natural caves owned by Société, on the top of a mountain, formed by geological perturbances. The conditions inside the caves are said to be a biological heaven for the fungi, with the precise temperature and humidity in which they thrive. There were certain windows in the rock structures called fluerines, through which the cold air blew inside the caves and circulated the volume of air inside.

But the ambience was certainly not for humans- outside the cave, at the time we went, it must have been about 25° C, and inside if fell sharply, bringing out the need for warm clothing, to 8° C ! So I had to endure the long lecture in French about the legend of Roquefort cheese (by a plump guy who seemed to feed exclusively on it) in hunger, darkness and continuous shivering. But fortunately at the end of the tour we were invited to taste samples of 3 varieties of the cheese, of increasing strength; I was not tasting it, but feasting on it. The souvenir that I bought from the place was completely edible- a portion of Société, Cave des Templiers, and Caves Baragnaudes kinds of cheeses.

But there was something with this species of fungi which delivered me an unexpected surprise later on. I enjoyed a pack of Roquefort cheese and kept it in the refrigerator. During the time, they were quietly getting used the ambience inside my fridge, and found it quite hospitable; and well stocked too! Anything else that was left uncovered in the fridge was seen as important stockpiles of calories to be inherited by the future generations of the fungi through their off-spring spores. So anybody who wants to develop a good immunity, just need to take a whiff from the grey-bluish green internals of my ice box!