Week 3 – Whiskey Cheddar, guest starring Byron, and Dominic

This week, with the help of cute cheese guy (henceforth referred to as CCG) at Fred Meyer, I decided on a whiskey cheddar. It was between that or a Jamaican beer cheese (maybe next week? Paired with a Red Stripe?). The description on the whiskey cheddar suggested pairing the cheese with a fruit, and a glass of whiskey of course. CCG suggested rather than fruit, pairing it with a salami instead. That was absolutely the right call and I’ll get more into that in a bit.

I’m not a whiskey fan, so our whiskey cheddar got paired with ‘the Kraken’ which is my signature cocktail, Kraken dark rum, pineapple juice, and cranberry juice.

Also, I know that’s a Moscow mule mug. But I’ll take any opportunity to utilize anything monogrammed for me.

Let’s talk cheese:

“I don’t mind talking cheese, I can talk cheese all night momma” –Byron, in his most pretentious WASP voice.

There isn’t a ton of history on the Internet regarding this cheese, so we’ll skip over that part. What I can tell you is it’s an Irish cheese (obvi), that can be made with either goat or cow’s milk (ours was cow), and it come packaged in a deep purple rind. My first question was whether we were supposed to eat the rind, but as soon as I opened the package the ‘rind’ (which was really just colored wax) fell off, so that answered that question. The cheese itself was much softer that I was anticipating, instead of having the firmer body of a ‘regular’ cheddar.

Again, I don’t know a lot about whiskey, so I can’t comment too much about how the cheese flavor compares to that of a whiskey drink, but I can say that I immediately understood why CCG suggested the salami over the fruit–that cheese was sweet. Sweet in the way of caramel or butterscotch. The salami pairing was the perfect amount of savory to compliment, rather than the fruit, which would have been overbearingly sweet. Not that sweet is a bad thing, in fact, we all did the awkward who’s-going-to-be-the-one-to-take-the-last-piece dance (as opposed to the leftover Gruyère from last week which I forced the boys to finish with our whiskey cheddar).

The boys review:

Byron: Devilishly rustic flavor of inside a cowboy boot… Dominic: That’s NOT what it tastes like– B: …weathery and salty D: it IS weathery and salty…like the candy at the bottom of grandma’s purse; sweet with hints of tobacco. Byron why are you so good at this?!

I never know how to end these things, soooo that’s all folks! Until next week!