A look at a balanced assortment of 13 cheeses to delight your whey-loving pals, and maybe stump your cheesemonger as well.
1. Farmhouse Cheddar is rustic, toothsome and complex, a total celebration of what can happen when cheddar goes right. It’s one of the more versatile cheeses to pair with beverages of all sorts, including beer, wine, whiskey and cocktails.
2. Fresh Goat Cheese is a simple pleasure that can heighten the most mundane of dishes and is great on its own paired with some rustic crackers or crostini.
3. Burrata could be a “Last Meal” cheese – heavenly!
4. Aged French-style Goat Cheese takes fresh goat milk cheese to entirely new heights. Imbued with geotrichum candidum mold (which gives the rinds of these cheeses a wrinkled, brainy texture), the best versions tend to have chalky interiors, a voluptuous layer of creamy goo beneath the rind, and a firm and entirely edible rind, making each drum an intriguing combination of texture and flavor – nearly three cheeses in one.
5. Epoisses is a washed-rind cheese that is stinky, but super creamy. It comes in a round, wooden box, perfect for containing its lusciously viscous interior.
6. Colston Basset Stilton at its best, is the epitome of what a blue cheese can and should be. It’s like velvet on the tongue: perfectly balanced between salty and sweet, stingingly strong and mellow. With a nearly sweet finish, it’ll make anyone a believer in blue.
7. Pleasant Ridge Reserve is a fabulous cheese from Wisconsin. Nutty, sweet and deep, with a dynamic finish redolent of wood, meat and brown sugar. If you love Gruyere and the like, don’t miss this one.
8. Lazy Lady Cheeses typify the art of small production American cheeses. Out of Westfield, Vermont, the cheese names – super tongue-in-cheek-y, like Tomme Delay, Mixed Emotion, Barick Obama, Big Bang and Lady in Blue – add a fun twist.
9. Super-Aged Gouda, aged for more than three years, turns into something more akin to candy than cheese. Hard, nearly crystalline, and straight-up sweet, this style of cheese can stand alone on a cheese plate, and is an excellent option for dessert for those persnickety non-dessert lovers.
10. Tomme Crayeuse is a spectacular natural-rinded cow milk cheese from the Savoie, along the French-Swiss-Italian Alps in France. Its creaminess makes it eat like a brie, but with an earthiness akin to pate or truffles. Mushroomy, eggy and buttery, there’s a unique flavor and texture to this cheese. The trick is to find it when it’s perfectly ripe.
11. Roquefort sits gloriously at the “strong” end of the strength-in-cheese spectrum. This aggressively-veined blue has some serious bite, and at its best, this cheese tastes nearly like the sea: salty and sharp. And so, so creamy. A true Roquefort isn’t for everyone, but for those of us who love a strong blue, there’s nothing that can quite top it.
12. Vacherin Mont D’Or is truly one of the more unique recipes around. It’s wrapped in bark, and so imparts a serious woodsiness to the interior paste. It also showcases true seasonality; it’s only available in the winter months. Unctuous, eggy and full-flavored, there’s nothing quite like this one.
13. Queso de la Serena is one of the more unique cheeses out there, mainly because it’s made with raw sheep milk and thistle rennet. Any cheese of this style would suffice in my list, as this type of cheese is its own animal entirely. These cheeses are nearly sour, but floral. They herald from southern Spain and Portugal, and it’s partly for this reason – that they’re so geographically specific – that this style makes the cut.
Source: Kitchn.com
