Supermarket Cheese vs Gourmet Cheese

You’re in the grocery store, shopping for dinner.  You get to the cheese counter and you see a piece of cheddar.  You pick it up to examine it.  It’s rustic-looking, with a discernable “curdy” texture, and one edge is covered with moldy, dusty layers of cheesecloth.  The cheesemonger offers you a sample, cut right off the big, thirty-pound wheel.  She suggests you take a whiff of the cheese before eating it.  That was a good idea, because you notice it smells so much better than other cheddars; it has a clean, earthy aroma, even a little sweet, and it reminds you of a farm you once visited on a school field trip.

You put the small sample of cheese on your tongue and a gentle, pleasant explosion occurs.  This isn’t like any other cheddar you’ve ever had.  All these different flavors keep popping up, as if following a musical score: first it’s tangy, then fruity, but there’s this musty taste that reminds you of a damp forest, then grassy-sweet, and finally it melts back to that initial acidic tang.  The cheese was so satisfying you only needed a little taste and it gave you so much.

You look at the label and it says the cheddar was farmstead-made in Somerset, England by a fifth-generation cheesemaker, using only unpasteurized milk from a specific herd of cows, and it was cloth-bound and aged in a cheese cave, and there are these initials on the label: PDO (Protected Designation of Origin).  And it’s twenty dollars per pound.

Twenty dollars per pound? 

But the plastic shrink-wrapped block of cheddar you normally buy is only three dollars per pound.  Why would you want to pay seventeen extra dollars per pound for the same cheese?

Ah, but it’s not the same cheese.  Sure both are named cheddar and are made of cows’ milk, but the similarities mostly end right there.

Go back to the experience of trying that special cheddar.  Remember how it smelled so honest and good, like the farm – and the earth – from which it came?  And the flavor… or should we say “flavors,” because there were so many that danced on your palate.  Even the cheese’s appearance said “hand-made,” with the uneven texture, showing the way the curds settled and were pressed together, and the handsome cheesecloth bandage surrounding the big wheel.  That was a real piece of cheese.

Now recall the last vacuum-packed piece of cheddar you bought from the supermarket.  It sure was a bargain, wasn’t it?  You got it home, sliced open the thick plastic, and the smell that escaped was a little odd: almost fermented, kind of chemical-like (probably from the plastic), and quite acrid.  At least the appearance was consistent – it was very smooth, looking almost as if it had come from a machine.  It didn’t exactly come from a machine, but the pasteurized milk came from an unknown herd of cows, and the cheese was made almost entirely by machine in a big cheese factory.  With your knife you cut yourself a thick slice.  Solid, boring, a little “cooked”-tasting, and very acidic.  In fact, the acidity seemed to shock your palate.  It’s good there were no other nuances in flavor to get overwhelmed by the extreme acidity.  In fact, you remember the cheese was so dull you had to eat quite a bit of it to feel you were getting your money’s worth.  Not such a bargain after all.