Flaws

Most of the time when I post I'm telling you guys about some fabulous cheese that I absolutely adore and love and how you should try it because only then will you reach cheese nirvana. Today is different. Sometimes bad things happen to good cheese.

Every once in a while we get a flawed cheese. Most of the cheeses we carry are made by hand, and sometimes human hands mess up. The other day I opened a wheel of cheese from an artisan producer in Vermont and this is what I saw.



Eww right? Well, kind of. Somehow when the cheese was being formed something went awry. It looks like there was an air pocket in the curds, so when the rind was forming it found the air pocket and started to develop into the paste of the cheese. Everyone else at work thought it was gross, but not me. I got a knife in there, dug out some of the excess rind and tasted it and the cheese just to make sure the paste wasn't affected. It wasn't.

I know it's a flaw. I know that no one, cheesemaker or cheesemonger want this to happen, but for me there is something kind of beautiful about this. It reminds me that cheese is a finicky, delicate thing with a mind of it's own and that even the most skilled and experienced cheesemaker is still a human being and has imperfections. It reminds me to appreciate the thousands of gorgeously formed cheese wheels that come into the shop every day and the skill it took to get them that way. Honestly though, isn't it kind of neat?