Dave has gone and three-wedged the most famous American goat cheese in existence, which takes a certain nerve. Humboldt Fog comes from Cypress Grove up in Arcata, California, named for the fog that rolls in off the Humboldt County coast, and the recipe famously came to founder Mary Keehn in a dream on a flight home from France. It has collected more award hardware than nearly anything else in the American cheese case. None of that obligates anyone to enjoy the rind, but it does earn the wedge a proper hearing before it's banished from the cart.
Here's the part that should sting a little: the Dairy Queen ice cream cake read is dead-on. Keehn built this cheese to look like a layered cake, so Dave reverse-engineered the designer's exact intent through the wrapper of a DQ Blizzard-adjacent memory. But the "fudgy crumbles" deserve a correction, because that dark ribbon is vegetable ash, a trick borrowed from French Morbier, and it is not mold. It tastes of nearly nothing. Whatever triggered the gag reflex was never blue-adjacent and never in the middle of the cheese. It lives entirely in the rind, a bloomy white mold in the same family as brie, grown over a second coat of ash. A soft-ripened cheese matures from the outside in, so under that rind the paste breaks down into the cream line, which is precisely the creamy, buttery layer Dave wanted to spread on a toothbrush. He was tasting two ages of one cheese in a single wedge: young lemony cake in the center, fully ripened cheese at the edge, and a rind that had gone mushroomy and a touch bitter on top.
The palate file needs another revision, and it keeps getting more interesting. This man carries a torch for Picón, a cave-aged Cantabrian blue that could strip paint. He strolled through Taleggio's washed-rind door with a shrug and a 4. And then a polite, fluffy bloomy rind on a goat cheese hit the eject button. So the funk-o-meter was never the axis. The pattern is specific flavors, not intensity: brine-and-butter stink is fine, sharp chalky blue is out, and now bitter mushroomy bloom joins the no pile. That's not a timid palate, that's one developing actual opinions, which is the whole point of the log.
Practical notes for the rematch this wedge probably won't get. A younger wheel is far gentler, so buy where turnover is fast and eat it within days, because that rind gets louder every hour it sits in the fridge. Take rind and paste in one bite so the cream line buffers the mushroom, or simply excavate the middle without shame; the ash line is edible and the rind is optional, whatever the purists mutter. Pair it with a sauvignon blanc, the single most classic goat cheese match there is, or berries and a little honey. And for the record, the bagel instinct is correct, goat cheese belongs there. The pig-in-a-blanket is between Dave and his god.
