Brie with cranberry, walnut and thyme.

A bit sweet, a bit savoury. Terribly simple, but very delicious.
Better baked, of course … but fine as is if you’re nowhere near an oven.
Cranberry, walnut, thyme brie

Recipe based on: imagination.

Gather:
1 full wheel of brie or camembert (not too firm but not too ripe)
1 handful of walnuts
Salt and pepper
A few sprigs of thyme
1 handful of dried cranberries

Then:

  1. Slice the brie horizontally, to make two half-height discs.
  2. Roughly chop the walnuts, then toast them in a small frying pan with the salt and pepper until they just begin to brown. Remove from the heat and set aside.
  3. Pull the thyme leaves from the stems (discard the latter) and then roughly chop the leaves together with the cranberries.
  4. Carefully cover the open top of one brie disc with the walnuts, going all the way to the edges.
  5. Add the cranberry/thyme mixture on top of the walnuts — ditto re: the edges.
  6. Place the other disc of brie on top (like closing a sandwich). Then wrap the whole thing in greaseproof paper and tie it up.
  7. Store in the fridge until just before cheese o’clock. If you leave it for a couple of days the flavours will really settle in — just remember to leave it at room temperature for 15–30 minutes (depending on the original softness/structural integrity of the cheese) before serving.* With seedy olive oil crackers, ideally.

Notes:
*If you are planning to bake the brie, I’d recommend first replacing the greaseproof paper with aluminium foil, then baking on a moderate heat (170° C) for about 15 minutes, then serving immediately. But full disclosure: I haven’t tried this. So tell me how it goes if you do!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s