Tesco Soft Bovine Board – Introduction

Hype is building for the Spring edition of the Tesco Soft Bovine Board (colloquially: “the bove board”). This festival of cheeses that are strictly: from Tesco; lactated by cows; below a certain minimal sheer modulus; requires careful preparation. You might be concerned that we were simply going to eat some soft cheeses from Tesco and discuss them, but what are we, hogs swilling in a sty? Never fear, it’s far more exciting than that. What began as a simple plan to eat cheese has escalated into comprehensive comparison of a fairly extensive subset of what’s available in our quite large Tesco in a quest to assemble the ultimate bove board, which promises to generate content for a period of some weeks or months.

The rules for inclusion in the board are simple, by which I mean elaborate and involved. We briefly toyed with just putting all of the cheeses on a board and eating them, but our resident cardiologist ruled this out – a look of intense horror in his eyes, further crevasses incising his oft-furrowed brow – on the grounds of its devastating impact to our long-term cardiovascular health. We instead began whittling down the field as follows:

• No suprabovine cheeses – all inclusions must be manufactured exclusively by cows.
• No blue cheeses.
• No spreadable cheese food products like Philadelphia, or roule-like cheeses.
• Obviously, no cold Camembert.

Then, we divided the remaining cheeses into semi-coherent groups and pitted them in a head-to-head battle. Each group stage will contribute one or perhaps two cheeses to the final board; hard-to-categorize wildcard cheeses will be granted byes. We won’t assign numeric scores to each cheese, but we will lay out which ones we would most recommend. For the avoidance of confusion, here’s a handy diagram.

Philip

I love cheese. Most of all I love the strongest Cheddars available; ewe’s or goat’s cheese are also often hits.