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Cheese Plate to Ring in 2010

January 4, 2010

My parents gave us a gift certificate to artisanalcheese.com for Hanukkah, and we were very excited to use it! We both love to try new cheeses — I’ve written about some of them in the past: Cheese Saves Us from Expired Tofu, How to Build a Cheese Plate, and Cheese Tasting Gone Bad — so this is a perfect dinner for us.

Apparently I should have consulted my own blog before we ordered from Artisanal, because we duplicated a couple of cheeses we’ve tried before and didn’t adore (La Peral and Serra da Estrela).

Our first cheese tasting of 2010 included:

Catskill: This is a goat cheese from Stissing Mountain in upstate NY. J. and I both liked the different consistencies of this cheese — the rind was mild and edible, then the inside edges were gooey, and the majority of the it was drier and not as luscious as those edges. This was a nice, light goat, and it tasted a tiny bit lemony to me. Very nice, but not something we’d seek out again.

La Peral: We felt “meh” about this lightly-blued cheese once before, and though it is described as rare we don’t find it to be anything special. It’s not blue enough for me, for one. It has a slight celery flavor about it, and it is very light and easy to eat, but there is nothing about it that hooks us.

OCSC Hudson Valley Camembert: It’s hard to go wrong with triple creme! This is a local cheese from the Old Chatham Shepherding Company and 3 out of 4 people in this house loved it. Yep, A. kept coming back for more, and I was impressed with his pronunciation of “camembert” as well. This cheese is a little tangy and so smooth — it doesn’t taste heavy even though it is as buttery as can be. We will definitely seek this one out again.

Serra da Estrela: You can think of Serra da Estrela as a gateway sheep cheese — it’s not too barnyard-y, although I did get a slight ammonia smell off of it. I might have liked it more if we’d been drinking wine with it, so I will make sure to do that when we tuck back into the rest of it this weekend.

We had ordered one additional cheese (Dorset) that didn’t arrive at all, and after a phone call we found out it’s out of stock. They’re sending a substitution this week so we’ll get to add one more sample to the platter when we take these cheeses back out for another tasting.

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Filed under: Cheese

Tags: Cheese Tasting Gone Bad, dinner, Hudson Valley Camembert, La Peral, NY, OCSC, Old Chatham Shepherding Company, Stissing Mountain