Nakladany Hermelin Recipe

A wonderful Czech dish - cheese in oil, garlic and spices, which you can make in three days, and then savour it whenever you come home late and wasted from the pub and need just the perfect and tastey thing to settle your stomach and help you wake up the next day without a hangover.

• get some hermelin (like camembert). They have different flavoured ones, so you can experiment with them
• cut them up into little wedges
• throw them into a pot with a lid
• to that add the spices: Dabelsky smes (The "Devil's Mix - a mix of red hot chilli type spices) or other hot red spice, perhaps chilli powder or cayenne, provensal spice
• shake the pot with the lid on it so that the spices nicely coat the wedges. You don’t want the wedges too thick because then the flavour might not penetrate to the centre.
• in a jar (I usually use your average larger sized pickle jar) layer the following: add a layer of the spice coated hermelin, whole black (or coloured) pepper balls, LOTS of slices of garlic (I like to cut them across the centre so the little whole thing is in the middle), red hot chilli peppers (I usually just use the dried ones), sunflower seed oil (I’ve had bad experience with other types of oil), and every second layer a bay leaf (so that there is about two or three in the jar). If you have extra spice left over in the pot, you can layer that in there as well.
• close the lid and let sit at room temperature for three days. If you can’t wait to try it, make sure you only use a clean fork, because you don’t want to introduce bacteria into the culture. Once it’s ready and if you won’t eat it all in one day, which often happens to me, put it in the fridge. If you see bubbles in the jar, it should mean it’s aged too long and starting to go bad.

It's supposed to be spread on good ol' Czech bread, but I prefer those healthy wheat wafer things. I like the crunch, the additional flavour of the seeds on the wafers, and it is something which lasts for a long time, where bread fails. If on bread then it should be fresh, but this cheese on topinky (Czech deep fried garlic bread) is also a good idea. Ya need that grease to balance all the alcohol y'know! Maybe not the healthiest, but fun things in life usually aren't, are they?