Reypenaer

I expected another decent aged cheese and got one I was still thinking about an hour later. I’m not going to pretend I can describe it like someone who actually knows cheese, because I can’t yet, and that’s pretty much the whole reason I started writing these down. It was sweet, almost caramel sweet. Kind of nutty, I think? And every few bites I’d hit a tiny crunchy bit, almost like a grain of sugar, that I had no word for until I went and looked it up. What really got me was that sweetness. Nobody added a thing to it. After a month of fruit and honey doing the heavy lifting, a plain wheel of cheese pulled off the same trick with nothing but time.

A couple months back I had a cheese called Picón Bejes, aged in a cave somewhere in Spain, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. It was so weird and so unlike anything I’d ever put in my mouth that it kind of rearranged what I thought cheese could even be. Reypenaer is nothing like it on paper. One’s a screaming blue out of a mountain cave, this one’s a sweet brown gouda from a warehouse in Amsterdam. But it took me back there anyway, to that same little jolt of wait, what is this, where am I.

That jolt is the whole reason I started doing this. I’m happy to eat the everyday stuff, the sandwich cheddar and the pizza mozzarella, and I always will be. But the cheeses I’m actually chasing are the ones that move me. The ones that drop me somewhere I’ve never been and make me wonder whether I’ve really tasted much of the world at all. Reypenaer got close enough to take me back to the cave. That’s why it’s the bar now.

Ate it with: some grilled chicken and a few crackers.