Queijo minas

Guava paste is set sugar and nothing else. Only a wet, barely-salted curd can take that much of it.

Cassava starch brings no flavour and no salt, so the half-cured Minas is the entire seasoning.

The curd has no salt to spare. Let the fruit season it and let the fruit acid do the cutting.

Bitter black coffee scrubs the fat off between bites, which is how Minas eats breakfast.

Pour it cold over the slab. Cane syrup reads darker against something this bland and this wet.

The guava move with the sugar cooked into milk instead of fruit. Sweeter, so salt the cheese harder.

A wet curd sheds water onto the plate. Oil turns that puddle into a dressing instead of a leak.

Soft orange fruit, soft white curd, and neither says much until salt arrives. Season them together.

The Portuguese original of the guava trick: harder paste, sharper fruit, and the curd copes with both.

Bitter dark skins cooked down to jelly, spooned onto flat white curd. Minas grows both of them.

Vicious pulp on a cheese with no acid of its own, and the seeds supply the only texture present.

Resinous red cherry over bland wet curd. The fruit is too strange to sit beside anything louder.