There’s something about Bleu Mont Dairy’s bandaged cheddar cheese that makes people speak in hushed, dreamy tones.
“When I eat it, I feel like I’m standing in a cave, or on a farm. There’s just this very specific taste of place in terms of just transporting me [somewhere],” says Walshe Birney, associate director of merchandising at Murray’s Cheese Shop in New York City. “Every time I eat a piece, I just sort of sit there and almost zone out, imagining where I am. There are not a ton of cheeses that really take me away to a specific place.”
Gordon Edgar, cheese buyer at the Rainbow Grocery cooperative in San Francisco, feels similarly. “They vary batch by batch, so it’s hard to describe [Bleu Mont Dairy’s bandaged cheddar] overall, but I would say that recently, it’s had this incredible great balance of sweetness with earthiness — a caramel-sweet flavor and also a milky sweet flavor. You usually don’t have both at the same time. It’s an incredibly well-balanced and complex cheese,” he says. In America, “you grow up on Kraft singles and mild cheddar, and then you taste something like that,” and the difference is obvious, he says.
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