10 October 2011

Cathedral City Cheddar and Lighter Cheddar (Tesco) [By @cinabar]


Cheese on toast is one of my favourite snacks, its quick easy to prepare, and darn tasty. Sometimes simple food just works and you don’t have to go to great gastronomic levels to have an easy dinner. Recently I have started making cheese on muffins, which is a similar concept – but I can pretend I’ve gone up market!

It’s arguable as to the best cheese for grilling, but we do like cheddar. I tend to buy full fat cheese for the purpose, but thought I’d give the new Cathedral City Lighter a try and compare it to the original variety.


I decided to start with the new Lighter edition, piling some cheese on the base and popped it under the grill. I noticed it that there wasn’t much fat dripping off the edge, and that it browned nicely and looked really good. Once cooked the cheese had a smooth look, with an appetising brown finish in the centre. The taste was rather nice. The brown/golden section was very flavoursome, and the hot melted Cheddar has a good strong flavour that worked well with the bread base. I would never have been able to tell that it was low fat, and I was really pleased with the final result.


I repeated the experiment with the regular cheddar, and popped it under the grill. Notably there were splodges of fat from the cheese on the grill plate, which had dripped off the edge. There were transparent drips as well as the cheese from the sides. The cheese looked cooked a whole two minutes before the Lighter lower fat version, but it had a bubbled finish even then, meaning it may have got a little too hot. It just liquefied far quicker than the other variety, which will be due to it being full fat cheese. The flavour was still seriously good from the cheese, but because it didn’t have the brown sections it was missing that cooked taste.

In conclusion the cheese on both versions was very good with lots of flavour. Both cheeses had a nice creamy aftertaste after the cheddar tang, and both delivered a very similar experience in flavour. The main difference was how they cooked, and it has to be said the Lighter version just worked so much better. There were no drips of fat on the grill plate, and it browned perfectly. The fact that it is lower in fat is fantastic news, and I’m very pleased to have discovered it grills so well. It gets a hearty thumbs up from a big cheese on toast fan. :-)
By Cinabar

2 comments:

Paulham said...

Try a soda farl/scone instead of toast.
It's a match made in heaven!

cinabar said...

I've never tried a soda farl before - but will gladly give it a try. I do bake a mean soda bread though :-)