Cheese is the new wine: Wisconsin Buttermilk Blue Cheese
Okay, look. I’m not a blue cheese sissy.
Yes, for many years, having only tried bottled blue cheese dressing, I thought blue cheese was putrid — at least until I tried a frisee salad with pears and blue cheese at a Legal Sea Foods in my early twenties. Fortunately for me, those were the wild west days of the dot.com boom (I was, at the time, getting paid $35 an hour to fix all the HTML accents aigu on a website for Nestlé) or else I never would have been okay with ordering a $14 salad and therefore never found out real blue cheese is actually quite good.
But I’m getting sidetracked.
Buttermilk Blue from Wisconsin is, for lack of a better description, the blue cheesiest blue cheese I have ever eaten, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The white (I guess you could call it) of the cheese has a creamy buttermilky tang, but the blue is like… have you ever eaten too much wasabi and it makes your sinuses hurt? That’s what the blue of this blue cheese is like — like a big blue cheese punching you in the face. I was into it for a couple good bites and then I was lying on the kitchen floor whimpering, “No más.”
I tried it a number of different way, but I could not find a way to make this cheese not overwhelm me, and now, sadly, it is languishing at the back of the fridge waiting to get tossed out.
Ingredients: Whole Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes, Penicillium Roqueforti.
Country of origin: USA (Wisconsin).
Aged: Two months or more.
Price: $11.96/lb. at Fairway.
Final verdict: You better REALLY frigging love blue cheese.
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3 Comments
Beth
I make blue-cheese dip which is simply sour cream, crumbled blue cheese, and grated onion (which is really just onion pulp at that point).
I tend to go pretty heavy on the blue cheese in the dip, since blue cheese is the whole point, but perhaps you can use less of this blue-cheese overachiever and enjoy it, tamed by all the sour cream?
My preferred dippers are baby carrots, broccoli florets, and strips of red pepper, but any veggie will do.
goblinbox
I love gorgonzola OMGWTFBBQ!!!!1!
This stuff, though? Punched in the face by bleu cheese? No thank you.
Eva
Hey you with the blue punched face, try dribbling local honey on your Blue and throw in some walnuts (toasted) to chew along and -viola! The bang is mellowed, but with the full flavor.Get up off the floor and don’t give up! A honey and good balsamic vinagrette over the Blue crumbled with grapes or Bosc pear and baby salad greens balances the sharp and salty with sweet.
Loved your review