If you fancy enjoying a tasty tapas in Islington, you can enjoy some wonderful meals with us, featuring a great range of delicious ingredients accompanied by great wines and other drinks.
Of course, great tapas can include a lot of very familiar ingredients. There are olives, onions, ham, garlic, fish, rice, peppers, tomatoes and chillies. On top of all that, there is cheese.
The most familiar of these is Manchego. Hailing from the La Mancha region, this is the most well-known Spanish cheese outside the country, regularly sold in supermarkets across the UK. Unlike most cheese you may encounter in Britain, it is made from ewe’s milk.
Made in an inedible grass mould with a familiar basket pattern, Manchego comes in different versions depending on how matured it is, although the harder and more matured Curado and Viejo versions with their nutty or peppery tastes are the kind you will usually taste.
Manchego is certainly a common feature of tapas dishes, with many delicious creations involving it. That could include flatbread along with tomatoes, chorizo with cheese filling, cheese straws, cheese puffs or even just sliced and dished up as an accompaniment to the rest of a platter.
All these and many more are the ways in which Manchego is used in tapas. But it would be a big mistake to think Spanish cheese starts and ends with this variety. That would be like saying Brie was the only French cheese, or Cheddar the only English one.
Indeed, we can serve a full cheeseboard of different Spanish cheeses, with goat’s and sheep’s cheeses to the fore that provide a contrast with the cow’s milk cheeses that make up most of those produced in the UK.
For example, our own shop stocks cheeses like Leche Cruda, an intense cheese, with the kind of sharp flavour that comes from unpasteurised goat’s milk. There is Gran Reserva, a hard sheep’s cheese with a strong flavour, a goat’s cheese with paprika for an extra twist, an artisan reserve sheep’s cheese with a milder flavour and Torta del Casar, another sophisticated sheep’s cheese.
These are just some of the cheeses that Spain can offer, with various regions offering fascinating varieties. Some of these cheeses get to be named among the best in the world. At the World Cheese Awards 2021, a goat’s cheese called Olovidia from the southern Spanish city of Jaen took first prize.
There are also blue cheeses such as Picon Bejes-Treviso, a remarkable blue that is made from a mixture of cow’s, sheep’s and goat’s milk, as is Cabrales. Others include La Peral (Cow’s milk and the cream of sheep’s milk) and Queso de Valdeon, which can also be made of a mix of three animal milks or just cow’s milk.
Spain produces some fine semi-hard cow’s cheeses too. Great examples include the Catalan cheese Ermesenda, while Mahon is a fine cheese from Menorca originally made with sheep’s milk. The best soft cheeses include Mato, Quesa de Burgos and Tupi.
So, while Manchego is the best known Spanish cheese in the UK, it is only by going on a wonderful journey of discovery in the world of Spanish cuisine that you can discover just how many more wonderful and even world-beating cheeses are out there.