Yay Toast! (Gjetost)

I often find myself thinking about the cheeses of Norway.

Okay, I have never thought about Norwegian cheese - I didn't even know they made cheese up there. Norway is in the Arctic, right? Cheese doesn't grow in the arctic, only in the antarctic. No, that's penguins.

I <3 penguins.

I digress.

On another one of our cheese-scouting adventures, Ash and I travelled back to Vinhus in Solvang, CA (despite our previous wohwoh experience there a few months earlier involving some serious ammonia stench). It seems they cleaned up a bit - the overwhelming smell of death-fish was gone, replaced by a more manageable l'odeur du fromage. Yum.

So, perusing the long refrigerated cheese case stocked with an overwhelming variety of unpronounceable cheese products, we stumbled upon this neat little cube of mystery:

what the?!

It said "cheese" on it, so we bought it. The little cube was about as big as a Rubick's cube, but more, uh, edible. It cost us $7, and it came with a warning from the very friendly cheese-lady: "It's an acquired taste."

Of course, we rushed home at top speed, and tore into the stuff. And we found this inside the neat little cube:

What the?!?!

In case you are as color blind as I am, the cheese is the color of caramel. This is not a normal color for cheese. Upon further investigation, it turns out that Gjetost (pronounced yay-toast) is produced by actually cooking the cheese as it forms. The goat-cow milk pre-cheese is boiled for several hours, allowing the natural sugars in the cheese to caramelize.

It's no coincidence, then, that the cheese tastes VERY STRONGLY of caramel. It has the consistency of semi-soft cheese but is very sweet. We nibbled it warily for a few hours, suspicious of this weird stuff we were eating. The best way to describe the flavor would be "chocolate american cheese" or "dehydrated caramel yogurt." It's got this weird tangy thing going on, it was almost disturbing. I didn't like it but Ashleigh didn't seem to mind. She insisted it would be good for breakfast, spread on something. Her dosage has since been reduced.

I think the problem is that we were eating fudge-sized chunks of it - the suggested serving is a thin slice on bread. This would be an interesting novelty cheese to have on a cheese plate, maybe presented in very small, very thin slivers. I can't think of anything to pair it with, maybe some apples or other fruits. 

The cheese-lady at Vinhus mentioned that Gjetost is staggeringly popular in Norway. People literally eat it everyday, packing it as a snack for hiking and skiing trips, shmearing it onto toast (tost?) for breakfast, and so forth. I'm still suspicious - this is the same group of people that eat Lutefisk for Pete's sake. 

So, if you see any, give it a shot, why the heck not. I hear it's gaining popularity here in the states. Look for the weird little cubes in the cheese case. Gross. I'm still trying to wash the taste of caramel-glazed feet out of my mouth. Glad I tried it though - who knows, maybe I'll give it another shot one of these days. 

- Alan.