I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a desperate salad from ingredients living in unexplored frontiers of my fridge. I have two usual strategies for transforming desperation into salvation: a good dressing and fetta. I know how to make a good dressing but I have no idea how to choose a good fetta. Whenever I’m shopping, looking at a sea of products with radically different textures, labels and prices, I feel as if I’m at the Björk section of the record store. I know there are some hits in there but pick the wrong one and I’ll end up with music completely unsuitable for a dinner party.
To figure it all out, I organised a blind taste test with an Avengers-calibre team of experts – Tiffany Beer (the chair of judges for the Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show); Penny Lawson (professional cheese judge and owner of Penny’s Cheese Shop); Petra Sugiarto (microbiologist and professional cheese judge), Timothy Cassimatis (Greek chef and owner of Olympic Meats) and Alex Grenouiller (owner of Marani Deli). We gathered at Marani Deli in Sydney and tasted 22 cheeses – pretty much anything I could find packaged with the word feta or fetta on it (feta has to be produced from sheep and goats’ milk in Greece, everything else is fetta).
