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“Fish and cheese can be a touchy pairing, but when done right they can be as endearing as an eighty year-old couple walking down the street holding hands.” “It's really about finding a balance,” says Kirstin Jackson, trained chef and author of It’s Not You, It’s Brie: Unwrapping America's Unique Culture of Cheese. Theses dishes work, and they work well.Īnd so it seems that seafood and cheese can indeed play nicely. Or look to classic dishes such as sea bass with fresh chevré and chopped herbs, bagels with cream cheese and lox, and our personal dinner party favorite, salmon fillets dredged in a Parmesan-bread crumb mixture before being seared in butter.
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Consider pizza, where cured fillets of oily, briny anchovies mingle their oils with those of melted mozzarella. You don’t need to be a classically trained chef to pair cheese and seafood at home. One of my most popular specials was a seafood alfredo that included shrimp, scallops and lump crabmeat. “Those old customs are falling by the wayside as chefs have become more creative with the blending of flavors. “When used correctly, cheese can enhance the flavors of many seafood dishes,” says Dennis Littley, a chef and culinary instructor with decades of experience under his belt. Rather, we’re enthusiastic advocates for smartly coupling seafood and dairy, and in the hands of a skilled chef, recipes combining the two can raise the roof, elevating both ingredients to new heights. We’re not saying that you shouldn’t pair fish and cheese. So, recipes may likely developed over the centuries without giving seafood any consideration.Īs always, though, rules are meant to be broken. Given their distance from the sea, few people in these regions had ready access to a steady supply of fresh seafood (rivers or lakes notwithstanding, and not necessarily always a source of abundance). Their regions have a terroir that makes for easy grazing for livestock and, thus, their cuisines are largely accustomed to the addition of cheeses such as Grana Padano, Bra, or Asiago as both a primary and supporting ingredient. Major cheesemaking regions such as Piedmont, Trentino Alto Adige, Lombardy, and Veneto are all largely landlocked. The stronger personalities of some cheeses would stomp out those subtle sweet and salty notes, leaving no flavors behind except for, well, cheese.Īnother explanation for this taboo may lie in Italy’s geography. This is why many recipes involving these proteins rely on simplicity a sprinkling of green peppercorns, a quick lashing of lemon juice, perhaps a pat of tarragon butter. Some ocean dwellers are especially delicate - such as flounder, haddock, clams, oysters, and Atlantic shad - and they should be carefully seasoned when cooked. It’s no wonder cheese can easily overpower seafood’s understated qualities. Cheese also loses moisture as it ages, further concentrating its complex flavors and fatty texture.
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Since cheese is produced by fermenting milk, microbial factors such as molds, enzymes, and friendly bacteria cause drastic changes to the milk’s chemical components and their flavors often become more intense. So where did this commandment originate? One explanation may stem from gustatory common sense: seafood tends to have a more delicate constitution, and those subtle flavors can be drowned out by a heady, assertive cheese. MELT: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese is available now in stores and online. A lot of people in the United States have adopted this notion, if for no other reason that they’ve heard it since birth. If the idea of combining seafood and cheese is such a widely-accepted global phenomenon, why is the concept so distasteful to so many Italian home cooks? And, hey, let’s not just point fingers at Italians here. And who can forget social gatherings in the nineties where no party was without oyster dip packed with enough cream cheese to send a marathon runner into cardiac arrest? In Chile, you’ll find both millennials and retirees ordering plates of Machas à La Parmesana, clams baked in wine, butter, and a mild-tasting Chilean version of Parmesan. Yet, if you stumble around France long enough you’re bound to find someone who prepares mussels in an earthy blue cheese broth spiked with white wine and garlic. Italian culinary doctrine – a constitution held up by Italian home matriarchs where infractions can be punishable by no supper or death – is very clear on the subject.Ĭheese and seafood shall not be mixed. Seafood alfredo: a delicious culinary sin