Sven’s Glass House

category: cheese
name: l’edel de cleron
price: $7
purchased at the Brookside Market
rating: 4 of 10

I don’t have much experience with stinky cheese outside of references to it on television.  In all of my crazy days in college experimenting (with cheese) I managed to never buy a stinky cheese.  Strange experience.  I had a guest when I unwrapped it the first time.  I nearly instincitively apologized for the smell.  I pondered for a moment if it had a chance of going bad.  I decided it hadn’t.

This cheese was quite soft and spread easily on the Ritz crackers (and later on pita crackers).  As the first cracker approached my mouth, with its smelly payload, I felt pretty strange about letting it touch my tongue.  But touch my tongue it did and it was mild and not that interesting.  I ate about half of that chunk (about 1.32oz, I suppose) with those Ritz crackers.

The next day I ate it with pita crackers and shbatto (sbatto? shatto? I’ll try to fix this later, after some fact checking).  Whatever the name of that dip, it’s spicy.  Really, the cheese didn’t stand out in this combo.  I’d spread some cheese, dip it and eat it.  The cheese just served to moderate the spiciness, I don’t think it contributed to the flavor at all.

I’m forced to rank this as a below average cheese.  It’s taste is completely average, but the stink knocks a point off.  I don’t think stink would knock a point off in all cases.  If the flavor was bold and interesting, then the stink might be fine.  A friend might comment on the bad smell, and I could respond, “Just get a taste of this.”  It could draw to the cheese, but here there wasn’t justification.

4 of 10

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 6:02 am and is filed under judgment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.