If we are fortunate enough to know a righteous Greek cook, we might occasionally come across feta in pastitsio - a macaroni and cheese and lamb and possibly tomatoes type of dish or spanakopita. If we are unfortunate, the cheese seems to be a culinary cliché on Eastern Mediterranean foods - For an extra buck, I can order a deluxe falafel that gets feta crumbles on top (also available on a gyro). I too see the cheese as part of a spinach salad (always with kalamata olives, generally with red onions), or in menus – either with omelets (always with kalamata olives, generally with red onions) that identify themselves as Greek or because they contain the word, Zorba, Homer or Athenian, we identify them as Greek.
Cheese expert and author Steven Jenkins writes while one feta can be creamier or saltier than the next, his feta customers aren’t shopping quality - they like what they like. Some of that might have to do with people chasing down the feta of their youth and he is forced to stock essentially the same cheese from Israel, Bulgaria, Romania, Sardinia, Lebanon, regions of the country now known as Hungary and from all quarters of the former Yugoslavia. No matter which country produces it, feta is largely the same – it is a fresh sheep’s milk cheese (although goat can be used and in the US, a milder cow’s milk feta can be found), formed into 10 to 30 lbs. blocks or cylinders, sliced (pheta is Greek for slice), it is placed in a brine to arrest the cheese’s ripening/maturing and shipped to market.
One of the issues with feta is it is a food that comes out of a specific location and culture – terrior – whose cuisine doesn’t translate seamlessly into the American diet. We like our cheese to be all melty and stuff. And tend to value the mealtime trinity of meat, veg starch above small tastes like olives, bread, fruit and cheese.
The original Moosewood Cookbook, loves it some feta though to an insane degree. Recipes describing the cheese baked with eggplant and/or bell peppers, topped on pasta, mixed in zucchini-feta pancakes, stirring in sauces, crumbled on salads and most frighteningly served with in something called an Arabian Squash Casserole – a dish which I am told goes well with tabouli, but I am going to doubt that assertion. The broccoli forest is not enchanted my friends; it is haunted by the moans of thirsty ghosts who ate too much salty cheese in their lifetimes.
As for getting the feta outside your Greek omelet, recently at Portland Farmers Market, two vendors joined forces and mixed feta and a sunchoke relish into a spreadable topping for bread. I hear it was good, oh so good, but for me, I would embrace the simplicity of the cheese and serve it by contrasting it something sweet like fruit or a fig paste, a chewy bread and a chilled cider or white wine that might run away from the dry towards sweet.
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