Idiazabal

Idiazabal
Comes from: sheep
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$19.99/lb

When I unwrapped this cheese I was immediately confronted by a certain... odor. An odory odor. A singe-ing of the hairs up in the front of my noise odor. A smell that reminded me of the way the back of your thighs stick to a car's plastic seats on a hot day.

Not a good odor.

And so I steeled my stomach and taste buds, and slowly cut off a thin slice of the Idiazabal, wondering why I hadn't picked something else out of the Whole Foods sample bin. Something nice and boring, like cheddar or gouda. Something not made from sheep.

And then, the surprise: This cheese tastes far better than it smells.

Is that even *possible*, I ask you? No, really: Aren't smell and taste one and the same? How can this cheese smell awful, or at least significantly unpleasant, and then undergo a metamorphosis of taste when it hits your tongue? Perhaps this is the x-men (x-man?) of cheeses, a shape-shifter indulging its talent only somewhere past one's lips.

(But not *the* shape-shifter, because I have seen that costume at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I can safely report that there is No Way in Hell that she eats dairy. Or anything.) (Hee, all those poor Midwestern tourists taking their four-year-olds to the superhero costume exhibit, expecting wholesome and being confronted by supermodel nipples.)

Anyway. This cheese. Hard to classify on many levels, besides "smell is assy but taste is delicious!" It's a hard cheese in that it holds its own shape, though I wouldn't even call it as hard as muenster. It's got these air pockets, see, this cheese:

And so when I cut it of course the cheese yields easily. Of course. The cheese is even kind of naturally flaky, like parmesan. Weird.

The taste is a pleasant salty-sour, if you can imagine that; it's a sheep cheese, but not the sheepiest of sheep cheeses, like it's pushed all its sheep-ness into its odor leaving room for another taste.

So that's this cheese, then! I would buy it again, which is saying a lot, because -- JUST IN CASE I DIDN'T MENTION IT BEFORE -- sheep's cheeses are not my favorite thing ever.

(A pause, now, for Gene Wilder and the sheep. I have no idea how it's relevant.)

The internet suggests you eat this cheese with jam. I say, sure, why not?