One of my earliest childhood memories of cheese is from a visit to a cheese stand at a market, where a piece of caraway cheese somehow found its way into my mouth. I can still remember the sharp taste and the gag reflex that followed immediately after. Another childhood memory involves my dad bringing home a cooler full of very smelly cheese from a road trip to France. Neither experience did much for my relationship with cheese, and it would be many years before I felt like giving it another chance.
Things slowly started to change when I was a teenager and began eating a little feta in my salads. It was the kind of salad cheese made from cow’s milk that I don’t think you’re even allowed to call feta anymore. Later came cheese on pizza and a little melted cheese in a grilled sandwich every now and then, and for a long time, that was more than enough for me.
During my university years, I learned to eat olives and anchovies, and at some point I decided it was probably time to learn to eat cheese too. So I invited a group of friends over for a cheese potluck. Everyone had to bring a cheese, and I would taste my way through them and hopefully come out the other side as a cheese person.
It wasn’t a huge success.
I learned to like Parmesan, and Philadelphia cream cheese was also okay, but then I had an unfortunate encounter with a very old Stilton that scared me off again. It would be quite a while before I felt any urge to expand my cheese horizons further.
Something changed in my late 20s, though. Curiosity gradually took over, and I started trying the different cheeses that crossed my path. I discovered that brie and Camembert were actually quite good, as long as they weren’t too ripe, and when a friend served me little pieces of bread topped with warm goat cheese, I thought it was one of the best things I had ever tasted.
My cheese repertoire continued to grow throughout my 30s. Manchego, Gruyère, Emmental, and Vesterhavsost all made it onto the list, and by my early 40s, there was a surprisingly good selection of specialty cheeses on the list of Things Sanne Likes to Eat.
There are still certain cheeses I’ve come to realize I’ll probably never learn to like. Cheese that smells too much just isn’t for me, and most blue cheese tastes like penicillin to me. A thick slice of cheese on rye bread is probably never going to happen either.
Then there’s Kunik, my great cheese love, which I discovered a few years ago in New York.
Kunik is an American triple crème cheese from Nettle Meadow in New York State. It’s made with goat’s milk and Jersey cow cream and has a soft, white rind. The combination of goat’s milk and cream makes it wonderfully rich and creamy, but without the strong goat flavor you sometimes get with goat cheese.
I absolutely love it. It’s soft and creamy with plenty of flavor, but without being sharp or too smelly. I think it’s fantastic on Danish rye bread or good crackers, and if I could only eat one cheese for the rest of my life, there’s no doubt I would choose Kunik.
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