Clothbound Cheddar Grafton Village & Mitica Amarelo Alla Beira Baixa

Clothbound Cheddar Grafton Village
Comes from: cows (raw)
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$24.99/lb

So the thing is, even though I don't love cheddar (never have, either, even that grocery-store stuff; my brother got cheddar on his sandwiches, and I got muenster, and also butter, on the muenster, which should explain everything right now), I keep *buying* cheddar. Because there are all these interesting cheddars at Whole Foods, you know? And I keep trying to convince myself that, you know, maybe it's just that I haven't had authentic cheddar yet.

But I still don't love cheddar.

That said, this cheese? This is probably the best cheddar I have tasted so far. But then, I also love its texture; a lot of the other fancy cheddars still ran to the moist, sandwich-cheese side of the spectrum, you know, pieces that give to the knife before they cut. This cheese is more to the dry, parmigiano side; it merely fragments. The flavor is cheddar, but subtle; you have to think about it before you recognize it. It's interesting.

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Mitica Amarelo Alla Beira Baixa
Comes from: sheep and goats (unpasteurized; is that different from "raw"?)
Purchased at: Whole Foods
$29.99/lb

The sign advertised this cheese as "buttery," and if your butter were made of the milk of sheep and/or goats (more sheep than goats, but you could really convince yourself either way), that adjective would be correct. Very smooth, squishy cheese, like... You know, the problem with growing up as an American is that cheese-texture puzzles me. I don't have enough adjectives that are communal. If we'd all grown up in France or Spain, maybe I'd have options other than, "This cheese's texture is like less-dense, melty muenster, and I mean the grocery store muenster, not that awful French stuff." Anyway. A palate-clinging, sheep-inflected (look! I did it again!) uniformly-textured cheese; right up to the rind it's pretty much equal density (as opposed to the last review's cheese, which had noticable... not strata, necessarily, but you could tell how far you were from the core). The flavor is neither subtle nor overpowering; it's a good cheese for mixing, I decided. Midway through my (generous) hunk, I decided it needed something, and then remembered that, lo, I had bought fresh figs on my same trip to Whole Foods, and lo, some of them were ripe. So I sliced a few figs into teeny-weeny hunklets and paired them with thin slices of this cheese, which turned out ridiculously well: The sweet and cool of the figs hits your tongue first, then the salt of the cheese, then the taste of the figs again, and finally, as you're almost ready to swallow, the full flavor of the cheese comes back and clings to your tongue and palate as the bite disappears. It's fantastic.

So. That is this cheese. Is pretty good.