I was walking past the cheese counter in a lacklustre mood when, suddenly, this bright, sparkly blue package caught my eye. I’d never seen this shimmery foil-wrapped cheese before. It was the only one of its kind in the stack of cheeses, and I couldn’t find a price tag on it, or on the shelf above it.
But the price didn’t matter — I had to have it.
Caronzola. What kind of cheese was that? Obviously a gorgonzola homage, but I whipped out my phone to Google it and all I got was a social networking profile for one Caron Zola.
Mysterious! Alluring.
I had to make it mine.
Bereft of its evening-gown attire, the Caronzola lay there, coated in a white rind, looking for all the world like an average, ordinary, everyday brie or camembert — and yet, there was something enigmatic about it.
The words on the package said “blue-veined”, but there was nothing blue about this cheese. And yet, that sparkly package hinted at something out of the ordinary.
Aha! Despite the modest exterior, the plain white rind, the exciting package was right — this was a cheese with a surprise inside!
Streaked with blue, the cheese revealed itself to the knife as a hybrid: part brie, part blue.
It looked for all the world like a brie, but it was so much more. It was stiffer than a brie, for one thing, almost aged. And of course, the blue veins running through it gave it a distinctive blue-cheese-aroma.
And yet, it wasn’t overpowering. Someone has gone to great trouble to make these two very different cheeses play well together.
Thinking of the pungent nature of blue cheese, we popped it on a sturdy, salty Triscuit. But we didn’t need to. This was a very mild blue cheese — hardly blue at all, you might say. And yet it wasn’t very brie-like either. The nuttiness was there, but the harsh, almost ammoniac flavour wasn’t. And, as I said at the start, it was much firmer — without the tendency to get liquidy that some really nice bries do.
I couldn’t believe how brie and blue could come together, and produce something so different, yet so mild, and so enjoyable. Definitely a cheese that you could serve as a conversation-starter, or if you wanted to introduce a new cheese-o-phile to the world of blue.
Grant Hamilton
