Shop Boy's Journey of Culinary Expansion: Crumbed Camembert

As I explained earlier, we had our first set of guests in our new house yesterday and as such we wanted to do something exciting to celebrate.

The question of what food to serve quickly became a hot button issue in the house. We had agreed on a little bit of fat hour, some pizzas for dinner and a white chocolate mousse for dessert; however what was to constitute fat hour was our main issue.

We decided that we couldn’t have anything to heavy or rich, as our dinner and dessert would be kind of heavy, so the obvious choice, clearly, was to crumb some Camembert.

Not heavy or rich…at all.

(We decided it was best to make some bruschetta as well…at least the tomato and herbs were healthy).

My sister has always had a thing for the cheese so I thought it would be an easy hit for our menu.

I was right, but I’m afraid that is a spoiler.

I went to Google to see if I could find a crumbed Camembert recipe, but nothing really seemed right; it therefore became my first invention test.

I decided to mix up some breadcrumbs, salt and pepper for the crumb and then added in some finely chopped parsley in a desperate attempt to cut through the richness.

With my crumb complete, I got to work on dicing and flouring the cheese, before getting to work on the crumbing process. A horribly messy process. After double coating 16 pieces of cheese, my fingertips had tripled in size.

That didn’t matter however, as they looked too perfect for me to complain.

Filled with excitement, I put a pan on with a Jamie Oliver sized lug of oil and waited for it to reach the perfect frying temperature.

I threw the cheese in the pan and they were off and frying. Quickly they turned golden brown and my ego grew exponentially.

This is where I started to panic…it seemed too easy. What if the cheese isn’t gooey in the middle?

Shit.

In a rare moment of rationality, I decided the best way to ensure optimum goo, was to fry the cheese until the first one split open and cheese spilled out. This would ensure they were all cooked…and gave me a sample before our guests arrived.

That is win win to me.

Turns out, the theory of my rational mind worked and the cheese was perfectly cooked and everybody was happier for it.

Not healthier for it, but happier.