Cheese for a Wednesday, pt.8

It's been raining. This is a good thing, but getting re-acclimated to grey and wet is always a bit tricky. Last night, it was tomato soup, but tonight was grilled cheese night. I knew where to go. Andrew from Andrew's Cheese hosts monthly grilled cheese nights. I haven't been able to go, but I knew he'd be full of ideas. O.M.G. I wasn't wrong!

I brought home a 1/2 pound of Munster from Alsace. This stinker has an amazing coral colored, sticky rind and a beautiful straw colored paste. It's also a fast melter!

So here's the 411 on the best cheese toast ever...Take one baguette. Slice in half. Pop in the oven for a few minutes to dry it out a bit. Rub all surfaces with a sliced garlic clove and butter liberally. Pop back in the oven to melt the butter. Then, cover completely with slices of Munster. Melt in the oven at about 350 until you can't stand it any more. Then put it on broil for 30 seconds. Try to eat without making orgasmic sounds. Just look at the Darling Husband and Perfect Dog patiently (!) waiting for it to come out of the oven.

If you've never thought of using a washed rind cheese for grilled cheese, please reconsider. Remember - they usually smell scarier than they taste, and the flavor is just incredible, especially with the garlic background. It's so rich, but with enough tang to cut through and deliver a nutty creamy-ness. Plus, on top of a crunchy baguette...nothing better. That's it. Bread, butter, garlic, cheese.

I know what I'll be dreaming of tonight!

The Grocery Store vs. The Cheese Store

When I was little, when we were being "fancy," we would get Munster from the grocery store, instead of Cheddar. There was something about the white, white "paste," so gummy that you had to have a really sharp knife to slice rectangles for grilled cheese. That red dye with the basket marks in it was so exotic! But my favorite part was how well it melted into a relatively flavorless, but stringy, melty grilled cheese.

However, much like many other cheeses from Chevre to Cheddar, Brie to Gouda, factory produced cheese for the grocery store, wrapped in plastic and pasteurized for "safety" bear very little resemblance to the cheese first created by farmers to keep their extra milk edible through the winter, and now produced by artists and sold in cheese stores (and Whole Foods cheese counters) around the world. To quote Murray's Cheese Shop, real Munster is round! Yes, not a square brick. AND, "At full strength the aroma of porcini mushrooms wafts from the gooey interior while the flavor evokes truffled pate and caramelized onion!" http://www.murrayscheese.com/prodinfo.asp?number=00000004399

To my mom's credit, we never got "pasteurized processed cheese food." But really, after reading the description of a real Munster (something that I might just need to pick up this weekend to taste to believe), I'm just not sure that we weren't just kidding ourselves re: how "fancy" we were. Granted, I doubt that I really would have been into mushroom scented cheese as an 8 year old, but I was the kid with the Deviled Ham sandwiches with onions. I might just have been showing early promise!