It’s baaaaack! Perhaps our tastiest monthly Achievement, Cheese of the Month Club, has returned! We’ll be bringing you twelve months of delightful cheese samplers, with each post coming on the second Friday of the month.
If you’re new to our cheese escapades, I’ll take a moment to explain. Each month, we receive a FedEx dropoff of 2 pounds of cheese from the incredible Pennsylvania Macaroni Company (better known as simply PennMac) dahn The Strip n’at. The cheeses have a theme: sometimes they’re geographic (the cheese of Spain, the cheeses of Holland, etc.) and sometimes they’re grouped by popularity, cheese varietal (all cheddar, all blue), or another quality, like free range cheeses.
January brought us Penn Mac’s “Most Popular” cheeses: three Italian cheeses and one from Holland.
First up was the Auricchio Provolone, an Italian cow’s cheese, aged for a minimum of 6 months. This is a stinky, very flavorful soft cheese. We found that its strong flavor lent it to be a great pair with strongly-flavored mustards.
The Montasio cheese is another Italian cow’s cheese, but unlike the provolone, it has a hard texture. Its flavor is mellow and mild, and that made it a natural pairing with sweet dips like honey and jam.
The Beemster extra aged is a cheese we’ve had before. It’s a hard cheese, with these little flavor-crystal-like bites, but it still has a creamy undertone. This is a goat cheese from Holland, and it is quite versatile with different pairings.
The final cheese was the Stella Asiago. This asiago is sweet and salty all at once. It was a great match for some juniper-infused kielbasa that we had from S&D Polish Deli down in the Strip. This cheese will definitely be making its rounds in dishes this month, as well. It’s perfect for grating.
Since it was a Steeler playoff weekend when we ate the cheese, we had to include a Terrible Towel.
(We also had to include an adorable begging dog.)
Our verdict on the most popular cheeses, as selected by a sample of our Yinzer peers? Pretty solid, all around. This sampler gave us a lot of different textures and flavors to enjoy, and the variety was very welcome.