Feta and Haloumi

Since cheese is not part of my daily or even weekly diet, the first variety that comes to mind is goat cheese, as it’s the only cheese I would eat regularly — goat’s milk is far easier to digest than cow’s milk, and I enjoy its fresher, cleaner taste. My all-time favorite cheese is a marinated goat-and-sheep-milk feta made by Meredith Dairy, a sustainable family-run dairy in Victoria, Australia. Their feta is luxuriously creamy and soft. It’s marinated in extra-virgin olive oil, garlic and herbs, and it melts in your mouth. The folks at Meredith Dairy say it’s because they make their cheese every morning, every day of the year, with fresh milk from their own goats and sheep. Feta is traditionally a sheep’s-milk cheese but varying amounts of goat’s milk can be added, as long as it is no more than 30 per cent. Meredith doesn’t reveal what percentages they use. All I can say is that they have it right, if creaminess is what you’re looking for.

I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to enjoy Meredith Dairy feta is with pasta. Stir some of the cheese through the pasta with caramelized onions and roasted cherry tomatoes, then crumble more over the top. You’ll find this feta is so creamy it doesn’t exactly break apart, instead it melts and glistens with its tasty olive-oil marinade. The cheese’s subtle tanginess mingles perfectly with the sweet caramelized onions. Heaven!

Another favorite Greek cheese is haloumi. Indigenous to Cyprus, haloumi is also traditionally made with a combination of goat's and sheep's milk. However, industrially made haloumi  is usually made with cow’s milk. I can’t forget when it arrived in our kitchen in remote New South Wales, Australia. It was the early ’80s, and my parents had returned from a trip to Sydney with a basketful of exciting and (then) exotic new foods: sundried tomatoes and foccacia bread, along with a bucket of haloumi cheese in brine. It seems funny to me now that even those ’80s food trends reached the Australian outback.

Many recipes you’ll find feature grilled haloumi, some served with herbs, lemon and olive oil. But I grew up eating it for breakfast with tomato on toast. We would grill thin slices of haloumi (and our toast) directly on the combustion stove until it was well charred. The firm, salty texture of the cheese was kind of like bacon for vegetarians—that’s what we used to think as kids, not that we knew what bacon tasted like (unless you count the time I sampled some cold strips of it at a hotel breakfast buffet during a road trip in the late ’70s). Anyway, we loved it — salty, chewy and delicious.

Being a vegan chef, I don’t experiment with cooking cheese much now, but I always appreciate the richness and flavor that a small amount of the right kind can do for a meal.

Spelt Ribbon Pasta with Marinated Feta Recipe