This cheese is a favorite in our family, but not usually accessible in our area. This was a gift, a nice surprise and a big hit.
Humboldt Fog is expensive, but worth it! Irresistible flavor, and if it weren't that expensive, I'd buy it once a week and gain 20 pounds.
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Humboldt Fog is definitely Cyprus groves best cheese. Its flavor is not for everybody though. It has a light acidity due to the vegetable ash. I like it best after it has aged for a couple of weeks and begins to soften around the rind while remaining crumbly in the middle . This is NOT a blue cheese as other members have stated, so do not expect a blue cheese flavor or texture. It is a soft ripened cheese, the same process used to make cheeses like brie and camembert. The blue that you see in the middle and rind of the cheese is actually vegetable ash. Back in the day the ash was used to cover the morning milk curds until the evening milk curds could be added. Check out Cypress grove website for more info on all their great cheeses.
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This is not a value proposition cheese. I buy a supermarket brand chevre priced at eight dollars a pound and I do not think this cheese is 3X better. In fact, in some respects that cheaper cheese is better because it has that "straight from the goat" freshness to it. Yet Humboldt Fog is an excellent cheese. I find the best way to eat it is to find a very plain cracker (not a saltine!), cut off a small bit of cheese and spread it very thinly. This brings out the aged flavor. Great cheese, not cheap.
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This is some of the best American-made cheese I've had, as are several other Cypress Grove cheeses. Cypress Grove is easily on par with high-end French cheeses, but that does not mean it's a straight rip-off from some traditional regional French recipe: just as American craft beer brewers have taken the Belgian and German traditions as a basis to create their own variants, creameries like Cypress Grove are coming up with novel varieties.
So what does it taste like? Well, first of all, the basis for this cheese is a creamy chèvre, that is, goat cheese in the French style. It is aged as a whole wheel, so the texture is different on the outside than on the inside. On the inside, what you find is more like an aged French chèvre, whereas toward the outside, it almost approaches the consistency of a goat Gouda. Then there is white mold on the outside (think Brie, Camembert), a subtle hint of blue mold (think Rocquefort, Danish Blue) further in, and in the middle, an ingredient identified only as "vegetable ash." Whatever it is, it's tasty. But not in a "wow I guess this is good but now I cannot taste anything else for a half hour" sort of way. It's just the right amount of subtle.
If you ever want to demonstrate to a Frenchman that Americans can make good cheese, feed them some Humboldt Fog. If they still protest, that's just snobbery.