Description
Shropshire Blue is an English cheese, specifically Scottish, and is one of the rare and delicious cases where our portal looks outside of Italy. Exceptional cheese! Made with pasteurized cow's milk, soft, with a particular and very pleasant taste. This cheese has a gray-brown rind, hard, cracked, spotted with various molds. The paste is orange: it owes its characteristic color to the addition of a natural dye, annatto. Annatto is a natural yellow-reddish dye (E160b), a carotenoid extracted from a wild plant of the Amazon, Bixa orellana. The intense orange of annatto, however, pairs well with the moldy green of Penicillium roqueforti. After salting, the product is aged for at least 12 weeks, but it's worth waiting longer. Shropshire Cheese: the history Shropshire Blue is a cheese that begins its history in Scotland in an attempt to imitate the noble Stilton, with the precaution, however, of adding annatto to the vegetable curd. Shropshire Blue was first made in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands, by cheesemaker Andy Williamson who had learned the art of making Stilton in Nottinghamshire, in the East Midlands, where he christened it Inverness-shire Blue or Blue Stuart. The success was immediate and the cheese was sold throughout the British Isles as Shropshire Blue, a name invented for the market.