Sometimes, you see something awesome and you just have to buy it. Like look at that dude on the cheese cover. Check out his moustache and beard and his incredible hat. He’s a chevalier — a musketeer, with all the ‘one for all and all for one’ code of honour that comes with it.

But he’s also dressed in a very incongruous green, lending him a wee bit o’ leprechaun flair.

So I knew that this would be a “must-buy, must-try” kind of cheese.

But it wasn’t just the packaging, you know. I’m a bit of a sucker for bries, and double-crème at that! Plus, the “fine herbs” probably meant it was interesting, and unusual, and it would make for a good blog entry. Any way you looked at it, this cheese was a winner.

So one recent morning, I plopped it on a plate with some grapes and some oranges, then brought it upstairs to Amy as part of a complete breakfast. I won’t lie; I was excited.

Mmmm, look at that, nice and close up (these pictures were taken on my cell phone, by the way, since Amy’s camera didn’t make the trek to my house that morning).

This cheese smelled divine. Although I’m not really great at discerning individual spices, as a whole, the flavour was very “Provence” and I’m sure it was primarily thyme and basil, with some other stuff mixed in to make it unique.

Although I had brought the cheese up directly from the fridge, and hadn’t allowed it to come up to room temperature very well, my cheese cleaver sliced through the brie extremely smoothly. I was impressed.

Also, as you might be able to see from the picture above (or below) there were herbs infused into the cheese itself, not just padded onto the outer bloom. That impressed me, right from the start.

Firm yet yielding, this brie was a cheese I could plausibly describe as supple. Although it was probably over-chilled, it was still really soft, and it had a very smooth texture on the tongue. Uh, except for all those gritty herbs all over it.

You see, that was the only problem with this cheese — the herbs.

The brie itself was great — double-creams usually are, even when they’re spelled “crème” — but the herbs infused throughout added very little in the way of flavour. The herbs that composed a near-solid outer layer, though, not only didn’t add much flavour (they did smell great, but it didn’t translate to the tongue) they actually detracted from my enjoyment of the rest of the cheese.

The got caught in my teeth, they roughed up my tongue, they kind of spilled everywhere. They just weren’t appropriate.

If you’ve got a prig of thyme, and you want to garnish a nice brie-based appetizer, go for it. But there’s no need to go as crazy as this cheese’s manufacturers have.

Great cheese, but the herbs add almost nothing.

On the back of this attractively-wrapped cheese, it reads, in French and English:

My soul belongs to Portneuf, yet my heart belongs to cheese. Seeking inspiration from the countryside around me, I lovingly craft shapes and mosaics of flavours. My gourmet cheeses embody temptation and the charms of days gone by.

Sounds like a seductive little cheese wheel, doesn’t it? And yet, we’d tested a few cheeses of the Camembert and Brie variety recently, and we’d been getting some flack from fans who thought we needed to do something a little more interesting than just waste the cheeses with old Triscuits and soda crackers. So we thought we’d take this plain-Jane Camembert and tart her up a bit.

Internet recipe to the rescue!

We found a trillion that called for baking the cheese, but we weren’t in that mood. We wanted something less hot and more cheesy — something we could still cut up and serve on a cracker. So we found this one:

Ingredients:

• 1-pound wheel Camembert
• 3 tablespoons minced sun-dried tomatoes, rehydrated
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 4 tablespoons butter, very soft
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• Handful of chopped fresh parsley

1. Chill the cheese, then cut it in half like you’d slice a bagel.
2. Mince the tomatoes and garlic together till they are almost like mush.
3. Mix the butter, tomatoes, and garlic together, then stir in the chopped nuts.
4. Spread the mixture on the bottom layer of Camembert—it’ll be about 1/2 inch thick. Press the top layer down and neaten up the edges. (Smear a little of the mixture on the sides so the parsley will stick.)
5. Roll the sides in chopped parsley, wrap and refrigerate. To serve, let the cheese come to room temperature and serve with bread or crackers.

We set to work finding the ingredients (two days’ work — don’t search for recipes online after 6 p.m. on a Sunday) and then we set to work making the appetizer.

Mincing the tomatoes, crushing the walnuts and mixing them together with the butter and garlic was both easy and difficult. Although we thought that a chunky mixture might have more eye and mouth appeal, if we ever make this recipe again, I might try a food processor — not to puree anything, but to have things minced quite a bit more finely.

The oil that most sundried tomatoes come packed in, by the way, might replace a lot (or all) of the butter. There’s a serious over-abundance of butter in this recipe.

After spooning the tomato-walnut mixture between the halves of the cheese “sandwich” and putting them back together, we chopped the parsley and rolled the wheel of cheese in the green stuff. This did not work as advertised — but chopping parsley is hard!

Although it certainly looked festive, the photo doesn’t really get across how large this wheel of cheese became. With all the tomatoes and walnuts stuffed in the middle, it’s a very thick appetizer. Cutting a wedge out of it, like we did, is nearly like cutting a small cake — it’s that big. Alternatives might be to spread the mixture on each half of the cheese and then leave it open-faced, perhaps, but that’s not what we did. Nope, we followed the recipe directions. What rubes!

See what I mean?! That’s a gigantic hunk of cheese, right there! That’s near-impossible to get in your mouth, unless you really want to wrestle it in there. It’s not pretty, forcing an appetizer that big on your guests. It’s really quite unappetizing.

But what really matters was the taste. So how was the taste test?

In one word: ohmygodawful!

We ruined what was probably a perfectly good Camembert with this recipe. Although the sundried tomatoes and walnuts might have been a nice flavour combination with the relatively mild cheese, everything was destroyed in the throes of the mighty parsley. But even that might have been tolerable — after all, just pick some of the leaves off — if we hadn’t had to gag down four tablespoons of butter!

Whoever wrote this recipe must spoon butter onto their morning cereal, enjoy a nice patty of restaurant butter in their coffee, and ask for extra butter with their baked potatoes — hold the potatoes.

Look, Camembert is already a pretty buttery cheese. There was no need to add more butter flavour. It was awful. It was tough to eat. In fact, this is the only cheese of the week that sat around in the fridge for over a week after we taste-tested it, waiting for hungry or unawares people to take a bite out of it. None of the other cheeses have lasted even a day.

Recipe? Fail. Next time, we’re sticking with the crackers.

Out of Quebec comes this modestly-priced Camembert, which I picked up on a whim and decided to give a whirl. Although I do enjoy traditional out-of-country cheeses for their history, terroir and sheer snob value, it’s good every now and then to support one’s own country, to give credit where it’s due, and to see what’s just around the corner instead of always following the beaten path.

Plus, who can resist that happy Canadian cow in the logo?

Unwrapping the cheese, I noticed that the ingredients included something called penicillium candidum, which Wikipedia says is related to the famous penicillin, but not closely enough to make any difference if you’re ill. Too bad.

Despite that surprise, when unwrapped, this Camembert was a plain-looking cheese. Much like Brie, it comes in wheels that are covered in a light fungal skin.

Even when cut and placed attractively on a plate with some Vinta crackers, it looked disappointingly bland. Knowing that Camembert is a mild-tasting cheese at best — and this wasn’t a very expensive Camembert, I wondered if there was anything we could do that would enhance the flavours at all.

Noticing some miniature oranges on the table, we popped them into the background of the photo — at least the “Cheese of the Week” post would have some extra colour in it.

Yes, this was a pretty standard Camembert. For its price, if you’re going to serve a soft, wedge cheese, this is a pretty safe bet. It has a mild, salty flavour, although there are slight bitter undertones. If only we had something that could sweeten it up a little.

Hey, wait a minute!

Could we maybe try a little wedge of orange to go with the little wedge of cheese? Of course we could!

Mmmm! Delicious!

The sweetness and slight tartness of the orange — a miniature, kid-friendly variety that was like a Christmas orange — perfectly coincide with the soft flavour of the cheese. The cracker, which has a pleasant, earthy grain taste, is a great base on which to place the pairing. It soaks up any excess juice, and doesn’t interfere too much with the interplay between the Camembert’s salty/buttery flavour and the orange’s gushing sweetness.

However, the cracker is totally not needed. All by their twosome, an orange-Camembert combination is a winner.

I would also try this as a breakfast cheese, and now that I know how well it goes with oranges, I might try it on toast with marmalade.

The Camembert, sadly, was a bit of a bore. But paired with the orange, I can’t recommend it more highly. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

Mmm, Gruyère. A nutty, mild, yet complex cheese, I picked this particular specimen up at Safeway, where it was wrapped in the nondescript “Deli” labelling that you can see to the right. But, as you can tell, unwrapped, by the imprimateur on the rind, above, this is actually a primo Swiss version of “Le Gruyère” — complete with the “AOC” designation that means it was officially produced according to the traditional method.

If I had perhaps deigned to purchase a thicker slice, I might have been able to decipher the actual brand, and been able to offer all my faithful Cheese of the Week readers tons of insight gleaned from fresh Internet searches about the company that produces this wonderful cheese. Alas, searching for “Le Superr…” didn’t come up with much.

(UPDATED: See below!)

No matter!

Forging ahead, I peeled the cheese out of its vacuum pack and let it breathe for a bit on the plate. Paired with knock-off Triscuits, so that the flavour of the cheese would come through as independently as possible, we were unfortunately drinking it with plain water.

From the first, it was obvious that this was a cheese very well-suited to drinking with wine. And, with a wide flavour profile that breaks down slowly in your mouth, I think this would go well with a huge variety of wines. The thing that immediately leaped to mind was a thick, complex red — but upon reflection, I wonder if a sharp, sweet white might do the trick, nicely, too. Perhaps champagne?

Or, if I have the chance, I suspect pairing it with this green-apple-infused beer from Unibroue, Éphémère, would be amazing.

But enough of pairing it with drinks we didn’t have.

What we did have was crackers and cheese. A solid, traditional choice. The knock-off Triscuits, not too salty, actually turned out to be the right choice for sampling this Golidlocks of cheeses. Not oily, but with a sheen; not hard like Parmesan but not soft like Brie; almost crumbly like feta, but still elastic and contained, Gruyère was Just Right.

This Just Rightness seems to apply to everything that goes with this versatile cheese. It can go with foods that are as pungent as onions or as yielding as bread — making it the traditional choice for French Onion Soup, by the way. And it’s also often served on a toasted ham and cheese sandwich.

In fact, everything Mozzarella can do, I’d bet Gruyère can do better. It would be spectacular on a thin-crust pizza with prosciutto and sundried tomatoes, for example.

Gruyère is also noted for its easy-to-melt nature. That’s why — shredded, and with Emmenthal, a bottle of white wine and a hint of kirsch — I made it the centrepiece cheese when I broke out a fondue pot a couple of months ago.

(Thanks to my buddy and co-worker Allison for the picture — I’ll write up a post All About Fondue soon.)

Perhaps the Gruyère isn’t the cheese for everyone. By itself, with simple crackers, it’s an unassuming little dairy product. But that laid-back nature hides a real workhorse. This is a cheese that I’ll be returning to time and time again. I particularly think it will be an active ingredient in baking and other cooking, but don’t shun it on the cheese plates — it’s got hidden depth.

____

UPDATE: Thanks to my other buddy and other co-worker Matt, who zoomed in on the cheese label, determined that maybe it was a “B” instead of an “R” and found this site, telling me all I needed to know about my cheese provenance.

Although some of their homepage seems to be improperly configured, I did find a PDF that indicated a premium version of this very same cheese — by this apparently quite well-respected manufacturer — took a gold medal in 2001 in London, at the World Cheese Awards (tragically, only this year and last appear to be up on the World Cheese Awards website).

Cool — found them on a site called Sneako’s Cheese Database, too!

Thanks, Matt!

Picked up this baby at my local Sobey’s, where I couldn’t turn down the dark orange colour, the under-$4 price tag or the promise of exotic spice. You can’t really tell unless you look at that photo closely, but for what you pay, you don’t get very much cheese at all. This was a 100-gram tiny little slice of cheese. So I hoped that it would be good — nay, great!

As you can tell by the label, this is a generically wrapped cheese, and there was very little in the way of extraneous information. Basically, what you see is what I got. So I can’t tell you what, precisely, was was the England Moroccan spice in the cheese.

In fact, even the term “moroccan spice” is misleading, since it probably refers to a mixture (up to 100(!), according to some websites) of spices known as Ras el hanout — a mixture that’s kept secret by the people doing the mixing.

I seriously doubt that there would be 100 spices in this cheese, though — it probably just has some of the common ones.

Although you can see a bit of oilyness on the surface of the cheese, the texture was more mushy-crumbly.

We paired it with some Triscuit “thin crisps” because that’s all we had around the house (it ain’t Cracker of the Week, you know!) and because we weren’t real fans of the “thin crisp” flavour, which was vaguely Parmesan-like, or texture, which was similar to a mini-Wheat. Yeah, imagine Parmesan-frosted mini-Wheats, and you’re on the right ugh-track.

We also sampled the cheese with a nice red wine — and we’re seriously discussing a Wine of the Week, so stay tuned.

Surprisingly, the bland dry flavour of the Triscuit thin crisps was exactly what this England Moroccan Spice Cheese needed. Although there was a hint of heat if you let the cheese linger in the back of your throat, this was far from a spicy cheese. In fact, the flavour was disappointingly less-than-intense.

Apparently, the “England” in the title refers to the cheddar-like cheese base that was used here. It’s got the texture and tartness of a nicely aged cheddar, but the Moroccan spice adds a slight bite and some complex flavours on your tongue.

We spent most of the tasting discussing how familiar yet unplaceable the flavour was. Since Ras el-hanout can contain many spices — including common ones like paprika, cumin, tumeric, cardamom and cinammon — I’m not surprised that we felt like the taste kept dangling on the tips of our tongues.

If you’re making up a cheese platter for friends, this woud be an eye-catching one to add. There are little bits of what look like hot pepper seeds (like in the shakers at a pizza place) in the cheese, and it’s got a distinctive colour. But unless your friends are true bland-mouths who want to “congratulate” themsevles on sampling something “exotic” this cheese has to be rated a taste disappointment. It’s edible, but not nearly intense or flavourful enough.

Sorry, Morocco — but I think this cheese sells you short. You must have more to offer than this limp flavour.

…

UPDATE: Saturday, April 4, 2009: Although I stand by this original review of the cheese I ate, last night Amy I went to a wine-and-cheese party at a friend’s place, where we were served this exact same cheese. Except it wasn’t. It was the same “brand” from the same store, same style, same price, etc. But it wasn’t the same cheese at all. It was softer, more yielding to the tongue. But when it got there, it was spicier, more intense, and more flavourful. A much better cheese.