Brunost, Ekte Gjetost, and Gamalost - the Cheese with Personality

"Brown Cheese And Birch: Nordic Foods' Appeal Grows"
J. S. MARCUS, Food & Drink, The Wall Street Journal (July 21, 2011)

"The bright-orange sea-buckthorn berry may sound like something from Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. In fact, it's one of Scandinavian cuisine's star ingredients, which are driving adventurous foodies to forage in cutting-edge restaurants, Pacific-Northwest wine bars, local health-food stores and IKEA outlets.

" 'I love the boom,' says Marcus Samuelsson, the Swedish-raised New York chef who helped pioneer awareness of Scandinavian cuisine in the U.S. when he was executive chef at Aquavit, which he co-owns.

"Mr. Samuelsson uses aromatic cloudberries-'the king of berries,' he calls them—in sorbet and serves the sour sea-buckthorn berries with game meats. He sometimes spikes a sauce with Norwegian brunost, a sweet brown cheese traditionally made from caramelized goat's milk whey. "It's like goat-cheese butter," Mr. Samuelsson says...."

Brunost is okay - more than just okay - but the Lemming wonder's if what's sold in the Pacific Northwest is, quite, Brunost. At least one sort of Norwegian goat cheese, packaged for export to the United States, turned out to be diluted - 50% goat cheese, 50% the sort of bovine cheese most Americans are used to.

Sure, it tasted sort of like a half-strength gjetost, which it was - but it wasn't gjetost. Somewhat of an anticlimax for the Lemming, who remembers real gjetost. And Primost.

This, perhaps, really is ekte gjetost - real gjetost:

"Ekte Gjetost 100% Goat Cheese"
CheeseSupply.com

"Ekte Gjetost means pure goat cheese in Norwegian. Ekte Gjetost is a unique Norwegian whey cheese made from 100% goat's whey, its colour is darker than Ski Queen's and the flavour richer. Its texture is firm and it is served in thin slices on bread or biscuits...."

"Ekte Gjetost means pure goat cheese in Norwegian"?? Oh-kay. Sort of. The Lemming would have thought it was more like "real goat cheese" - but what the hey: "Pure" is sort of like "real." And the Lemming would expect ekte gjetost to be 'real' gjetost - not half-and-half.

So, there's brunost, and gjetost - ekte and otherwise. But why is there such a thundering silence on the subject of gamalost? Sure, it's got an aroma you'll never forget: and Wikipedia says it's "a brownish-yellow cheese with irregular blue veins."

But what's a little body odor and a complexion issue to someone who's into cheesy food?

The Lemming could have phrased that differently. Probably should have.

Related posts:

• "Lemming Tracks: Fourth of July Weekend, 2011"
  (July 1, 2011)
  • Check out the cheesy sculpture
• "At Last! A History of the Limburger Cheese Sandwich!"
  (January 27, 2011)
• "A Thought for the Day: About Cheese"
  (January 8, 2011)
• "Pumpkin. Spice. Cream Cheese. What's Not to Like?"
  (January 11, 2010)
• "The Moon, Cheese, Aristotle, and What We've Known"
  (October 5, 2009)

A Thought for the Day: About Cheese

"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?"
Charles De Gaulle, in "Les Mots du General", 1962
The Quotations Page

Signing of the Declaration of Independence, Sculpted in Wisconsin Cheddar

It's patriotic, and tastes great on crackers!


(from Oddly Enough / photo by Lucas Jackson, Reuters, used w/o permission)

"Big cheese carving celebrates Independence Day"
Reuters (July 3, 2008)

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - A sculpture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence made from a one-tonne block of cheddar cheese glistened on the sidewalk of Times Square in New York on Thursday as an artist's tribute to the Fourth of July.

" 'It's very patriotic, using the signing of the Declaration of Independence, bringing Americans together for the Fourth,' said Troy Landwehr, who carved the sculpture for cracker company Cheez-It to celebrate U.S. Independence Day.

"He worked eight hours a day for a week in a 40-degree cooler carving the block of Wisconsin cheddar."

That 2,000-pound chunk of cheese isn't going to waste. After being on display in New York and Philadelphia, it's going back to Wisconsin: where it'll be donated to food pantries. It should still be good to eat then. Mr. Landwehr's coated it in cooking oil, which keeps it from drying and cracking.

About Geitost, Goats, Cheese, and Taste

(As I said, back in Lemming Tracks, this is the last post I'll make, for about 24 hours. Until then, here's a word about Geitost.)

In a previous post, I mentioned gjetost. If you know about this aromatic and unforgettable (no matter how hard you try) goats-milk cheese at all, you probably spell it geitost.

I'm half Norwegian. Growing up, my grandmother sometimes let me east gjetost, a goats-milk cheese. That's pronounced "yaytost," by the way, by this American-English speaker who heard heard the (Oslo-area) Norwegian pronunciation.

I learned that primost was a more 'upper crust' sort of cheese, but I liked my gjetost.

A few years ago, I decided to treat myself to a block. That took a little doing. The stuff's not to be found around central Minnesota now: Scandinavians being what we are, we've abandoned much of our culture over the generations.

And eating habits.

I special-ordered a small amount of gjetost: and discovered that the taste wasn't quite as definite as I remembered. Naturally enough, I thought. It's been upwards of four decades since I tasted it, and my senses may have dulled.

Then I looked at the label. The stuff, made for export to English-speaking countries, was diluted 50-50 with cow's milk!! COW'S milk! No wonder it tasted bland.

Oddly, the closest I've found to gjetost is a Middle-Eastern cheese: and, confound it, I can't remember the name! Frustrating.

I thought, once, of keeping a few goats, so that we could make our own cheese. My wife pointed out all the labor involved in making cheese. She also pointed out that we live in town and that, unlike me, all our neighbors have a sense of smell.