Halloumi-nating Ways to Eat our National Cheese
If you’ve ever eaten at a trendy restaurant in Europe, chances are you’ve had halloumi in one form or another. Whether grilled, fried, baked or grated, this squeaky super-cheese has been taking the world by storm, with famous chefs like Gordon Ramsay and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson using it as an ingredient.
In the UK, demand for this traditional Cypriot product has soared in the past few years, and exports from the island to Great Britain are an estimated 45 per cent. According to the Cyprus News Agency, Chris Dawson, in charge of cheese buying at Waitrose, said: “It’s easy to see why halloumi’s popularity has soared in the UK – it’s a tasty, quick mid-week meal option and we’ve seen sales increase 26 per cent in the past two years.”
Here, in Cyprus, we tend to use halloumi in almost everything, combining it with olives and bread, for breakfast, and we eat it with watermelon and bread for a refreshing snack in the summer heat. We grate it on our pasta, we use it as a topping, and we put it in our sandwiches, in other words, we love it. So much so, that each Cypriot eats an average of 9kg of halloumi per year.
As an ode to this marvel of Cypriot ingenuity, here are a few ways you can enjoy our national cheese:
Slap it on a grill
This is by far the tastiest and easiest way to enjoy halloumi. Halloumi has a very high melting point, making it perfect for the grill. No preparation is required before you grill the cheese, just throw it on that barbeque or your oven grill, and in a few moments, you will get a golden brown slice of heaven.
Just make sure you keep an eye on it, as it will be ready in a few minutes. Once the crust is lightly brown, the cheese is done. Grilled Halloumi is a great side dish for your barbeque, but it rarely gets there as we eat it usually as we are cooking it.
Fry it with eggs
You can dice it up, throw it in a pan and mix it with your eggs, but the Cypriot way of eating halloumi and eggs is to fry theme separately. Salt is not necessary, as halloumi is naturally very salty. One way of reducing the saltiness is to rinse the halloumi with water after removing the packaging.
Stick it in a bun
Raw and grilled halloumi sandwiches are very popular here, and they go with almost every ingredient. We suggest combining halloumi with lountza (smoked pork tenderloin), tomato and cucumber, or roast pork, piccalilli, tomato and cucumber. You can try these sandwiches at any local food truck.
And since the world is so taken with halloumi, here are a few videos of what chefs come up with using the ingredient. Here’s Gordon Ramsay using it for his Ultimate Vegetarian Lunch.
Or this guy making halloumi fries..
We were particularly surprised with this stir-fry..
