Putting cheese at the centre.
The five-course menu built for the Antre Gourmet × IWSA cheese dinner: an Anatolian cheese on every plate, a Turkish wine beside every cheese.
When building a cheese dinner, the first question is simple: how present should the cheese remain on the plate? For the Antre Gourmet × IWSA dinner the answer was clear. Cheese would lead every plate; sauce, spice and garnish would not get in its way.
The cheeses came from Antre Gourmet’s selection of Anatolian producers, the wine pairings from IWSA. The menu moved between these two selections across five plates.
Five plates, five cheeses
- Kargı tulum
- A rose of roasted beetroot, Kargı tulum cream, rose-scented sour cherry sauce and crispy buckwheat. The salt and creaminess of the tulum met the sharpness of the cherry.
- Malatya village cheese
- Seed-crusted and pan-fried, with caramelised butternut, sumac, pumpkin seeds and verjuice sauce.
- Kaymaklı lor and Urfa sheep’s kelle
- Gnudi made from these two cheeses, with sage beurre noisette, lemon and crispy sage.
- Bükdere mould-ripened katık
- Beside slow-cooked beef brisket, as a potato velouté, with a glazed shallot tart.
- Niğde blue
- In the dessert: dark chocolate crémeux, roasted pear, Niğde blue, toasted hazelnut crumble and honey.
Testing the risky pairings first
A dessert where cheese meets chocolate, or the texture of a cheese crisp, can look good on paper. Points like these are tested with product samples beforehand; the balance of salt, fat and sweetness is adjusted plate by plate.
The result was a flow that showed cheese in a different form on every plate: a cream, a seared slice, gnudi, a velouté and finally inside the dessert.