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Photo: whatamieating.com

Cheese board: top hole

Susan Jung

 

Murol cheese is striking for its shape: with its reddish-golden rind, it looks somewhat like a squashed angel food cake, or perhaps more like a cylinder with a hole in the middle. It starts off as a solid wheel of cheese, then somewhere along the line, the centre part is removed, which helps the large, heavy cheese mature evenly, because there's more surface area. The centre part of the cheese is sold separately as or .

Murol is named after a village in the Auvergne region of France, where it is produced. It's a pasteurised, washed-rind cheese, but the scent is not nearly as pungent as other such cheeses, say, , and the texture is also firmer and less spreadable than that of other varieties.

With solid round and square cheeses, the most desirable part is usually the centre (some might argue that it's the rind, but they would be wrong!). The cheese matures from the outside in, so the centre is relatively softer than the part closest to the rind. With murol, though, there is no real "centre" because of the hole; instead, it's ripening from four surfaces, rather than just three, as with most other types of cheese.

 

 

 

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