Cheese of the Week: Arla Esrom

I don’t think Amy always likes Cheese of the Week. Especially this week. You see, although sometimes the Cheeses of the Week are planned a ways in advance, sometimes (like this week) they’re not. And so I spring it on her, and she doesn’t always like the cheese, and then I borrow her camera, and make her fix all the settings for me — and she doesn’t even like the cheese!

That was especially true this week. Hovering over the cheese counter at the local supermarket, I wasn’t sure what to try. I’ve been asked by a reader to try to find a nice hard cheese for a hiking excursion, but there wasn’t anything there that caught my eye, unless I wanted to buy $20 or more in a wedge of cheese (I prefer the $5 wedges). Maybe next week.

Then I noticed the bright foil blue of the Esrom cheese. ‘What the heck is Esrom?’ I asked myself. Then I asked Google, on my phone.

But, because using Google on my phone is always a little slow, and because it’s exceedingly frustrating when you’re at the back of a metal building that appears to have been built as a Faraday cage, I didn’t click through on any of the links. Instead, I trusted the mini-excerpts that came with the search results. I got words like “mild”, “buttery” and “Havarti.”

That’s how I sold the cheese to Amy, when she said that she was craving a snack.

Holy moly was I unprepared!!

Unwrap the foil and cut a slice off this cheese as fast as you can, because it is a pungent little guy. It smells. It stinks. It fills a room with its unpleasant aroma. Even the next morning, after putting it away and washing up — and brushing my teeth — I think I still smelled it here and there. It is a smelly, smelly cheese. It has a distinctive smell that’s not really completely awful, but definitely unpleasant. I got used to it, eventually, but Amy never did. Let’s just say that this is best as an outdoors cheese.

I was understandably hesitant to taste it. But I managed to pop it in my mouth. (As an aside, the crackers I chose, a generic baked wheat cracker, I chose specifically for their probably blandness, which I figured wouldn’t interfere too much with what I thought would be a Havarti-like mild cheese.)

Surprisingly, because I happen to know that the taste sense is connected to the smell sense, this cheese really does have a remarkably mild taste. It’s not exactly Havarti-like, and I wouldn’t call it buttery, exactly, but this cheese is deceptive, so I can see where others might get those characterizations.

I won’t go crazy here — it’s not a great-tasting cheese. Even on a bland cracker, it has trouble holding its own. But then again, it not only has to compete with the cracker, but with its own rank smell.

So, sure the flavour was, well, let me characterize it as inoffensive — which, considering the still-wafting odour, is a significant accomplishment. But I felt a little betrayed by the Goolging. So I Googled it again, this time with the benefit of a higher-speed Internet connection.

Aha! Wikipedia’s entry for Esrom cheese notes that it is “Trappist-style.” A few years ago, I went to a earby Trappist monastery where they still make cheese, and I do recall this bizarre combination of high smelliness, low taste. Someday I plan to go back and review it here.

But I also saw that Wikipedia said that an Esrom went well with red wines and dark beers.

Since I just happened to have a Samuel Adams Black Lager chilling in my fridge, I decided to put the crowd-sourced, anonymous Wikipedia to the test. I poured myself a nice glass of Black Lager (it, by the way, is a farily easy-to-drink dark beer — not too challenging for a beginner to darks, but also with enough flavour and complexity to be enjoyable; technically, it’s a Schwarzbier).

Keen-eyed readers will note that this is the same glass I previously used for six-month-old eggnog.

So, the verdict with a dark beer pairing?

Astonishing!

The caramel sweetness of the Sam Adams Dark Lager brings out an unheretofor flavour from this cheese that is simply a delight. No, it doesn’t do away with the nasty smell, which may still pervade my house to this day, but after a while, you do kind of get used to the smell, unless you’re deliberately looking for it, and in your mouth, with some dark beer swirling around, this cheese nearly explodes with flavour.

I think Amy disagrees on how wonderful it got, but, with slug of beer in the back of my throat, I basically couldn’t stop eating this cheese. Until, that is, the beer ran out.

At that point, we quickly wrapped up the cheese. In foil, and then in Saran Wrap. And then we put it away in the fridge. And then we rinsed the knife and plate.

Would I buy it again? Not soon — after all, I still have loads in my fridge. And there are better cheeses out there, for the same price or cheaper. But it was a fun experience, and I’m glad that learned how much better it could be. There’s a lesson in there — I should always have some wine or beer with these cheeses of the week!