Manteigaria Silva

At more than 100 years old, the city’s best charcutaria has set up shop in the Mercado da Ribeira with an array of Portuguese cheeses and sausages of the very best quality. They can all be sampled as part of selection boards, in sandwiches or to take home. From the original shop in Lisbon’s Baixa come professionalism and tradition; from the Mercado da Ribeira comes the inspiration to make this a showcase for original products, all of them made in Portugal.

Time Out says “The cured queijo da Serra cheese is the great treasure here. It shows how it is only possible to launch a project such as this with a lot of work, a lot of knowledge and, above all, a love of what you do.”

Recipe

Queijo da Serra Curado

The process by which cheeses from the Serra da Estrela are matured (curado) in the back of Manteigaria Silva, in Rossio, is almost magical. It only fails to quality as genuine magic because it can be seen by curious clients who make a point of peeping behind the counter, and because it demands technique, patience and a lot of work. The cheeses arrive from Celorico da Beira still in their soft state and are laid out on wooden boards inside a cold store with controlled humidity and temperature. After two to three months they are dipped in paprika oil. Two weeks later they are cleaned and left to cure for a further six or seven months, during which they are every day cleaned (by hand) to remove impurities (in the form of small black spots) and turned upside down. This process takes about two hours, given that we are talking about some 600 cheeses. After nine months they are put on sale.

Ingredients

– SOFT QUEIJO DA SERRA
– PAPRIKA OIL