Cheese of the Week: Sobey’s generic blue cheese

Wrapped in some nondescript plastic wrap, topped with a laser-jet-printed label that read simply “Blue Cheese,” this was as unassuming as a blue cheese ever gets. It was like a gutter urchin, plucked out of obscurity and given the chance to sing at Carnegie Hall. This is not a name brand cheese, thiswas not aged in a famous cave, from a recipe developed by monks. This was nothing special.

Or was it?

We’ve been getting some flack here at Cheese of the Week for doing nothing with our cheeses except ruining them with simple crackers. Our response has been that we focus on the cheese — if there was too much other stuff involved, who would know whether it was the cheese that deserved the praise or the criticism. Perhaps the cheese was fine, it was the recipe we paired it with that failed. No, we preferred to let the cheese stand or fall on its own.

And yet … it looks sort of lonely there, all alone on a Vinta cracker.

This is a smooth, creamy blue — not crumbly, like some of them are. It borders on cream cheese, actually, as you can perhaps see by the knife marks at the left, above.

Traditionally, you’d think that a creamy, smooth easy-to-spread cheese would be delicious on a cracker — and you’d be right.

But the sharp taste of even a cheap blue cheese demands something sturdier than a simple cracker. It demands … meat.

Amy’s step-dad Don bought the cheese. And he bought the steaks. And it’s his barbecue — so I wasn’t about to argue with him, even if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to! Blue cheese on steaks? Sign me up!

Although it was soft for a blue cheese, it crumbled nicely, and he sprinkled it on some nice thick steaks.

Put the lid down, let it melt a bit, and presto!

A perfectly done steak, with Caesar salad, a baked potato with trimmings — and topped with blue cheese. Doesn’t that look good? Because it tasted delicious!

Melting the blue helped soften its flavours to match the creaminess of its texture. Although the blue-green veins of mold that give the cheese its name have a sharp-sour taste that never quite goes away, when melted, all the hard edges are rounded off.

It didn’t hurt to pair it with meat, either. A blue cheese is a strong cheese — even melted, it held its own with the other strong flavours that were on the plate.

If you’re not (yet) a fan of blue cheese, this would be a good way to get introduced.