I got some STINKY CHEESE.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I bought this cheese the other day. It was called “St. Albray’s”.

Wheeeee doggies does this stuff STINK.

If you read that link, the person who threw the cheese off the cliff and gave it negative 20 stars had it right and wrong. It smells like a shitty fart. I’ll give her that. HOWEVER, anyone who actually has eaten a lot of cheese knows that a lot of good cheese smells like a shitty fart (real camembert, stinking bishop (yes a real cheese), and many more), and that’s often indicative of the cheese being pretty tasty. She was very clearly an unsophisticated cheese eater (try to take that statement derisively but not snobbishly, if possible).

This cheese MAY be milder than real camembert (like the unpasteurized stuff you can only get in France) but it’s not milder than the Camembert I’ve gotten in the States. Let me revise that. It doesn’t smell milder. It might taste milder.

If you haven’t eaten cheese that smells like a shitty fart, it’s hard to describe to you. Your whole conscious self tells you, “no way should I be putting that in my mouth” but when you do, the combination of the aroma and taste and feel makes for a pleasant experience.

So, anyway, in the supermarket you could smell the stuff though the plastic wrap. Then, I got it home, had some and sealed it in a ziploc bag and put in in a drawer in the fridge. Opened the fridge about an hour later and the whole fridge smelled like a shitty fart. So, I sealed the ziploc bag in tupperware and put it in the fridge. The fridge still smelled like a shitty fart. So, I finally put the tupperware container (which contained a ziploc bag which contained the cheese) in a plastic supermarket bag which I tied up. That MOSTLY took care of it.

If I unwrap the plastic bag, my dog will run from anywhere in the house because he smells the cheese. He doesn’t come running for any old rustling of a plastic bag – believe me, he smells the cheese. And, he likes the cheese.

If any of you haven’t had really stinky cheese, you may not be perfectly familiar with the expression “who cut the cheese”. But let me tell you when you have a sealed block of, lets say, Camembert, and cut into it, a big smelly fart smell will fill the air. It will become very clear to you that “cutting the cheese” is a natural expression.

That St. Albray’s is some stinky cheese, dude.

And I highly recommend it.

2

Great post! That reminds me of something similar. My wife and I once brought a soft Swiss cow cheese called a tomme Vaudoise to an Italian couple’s place for a dinner party. It turned to be a particularly stinky specimen, and after a few polite tastes, our friends put the remainder away in their fridge.

A couple of days later, I heard from my friend’s girlfriend. She told me that the day after the party, when she opened the fridge for something, she immediately heard a muffled cry, FROM THE BATHROOM, “hey shut the fridge door”!.

You know a cheese is stinky if it spoils the odor of the bathroom…

3

Oh, I hear you. I once bought a La Chatelaine camembert while out shopping at lunch, and put it in the office fridge for the afternoon. EVERYONE in the office started scolding the receptionist, whose job it was to clean out the fridge every week, for leaving something in there long enough to spoil. Poor thing. I was too chagrined to admit I was the culprit and whisked the cheese away at 5 to devour after dinner that night.

BTW, drink a fruity red like an American zinfandel or a French Cotes-du-Rhone with that stinky cheese of yours. The combination is heavenly.

4

I have a passable california red zin at home.

Although so far, I’ve only had the cheese with a spicy, crisp white that I have. I don’t think it was the best pairing.

My French brother-in-law was really surprised to see that cheese here. He claims that the combination of red wine with cheese after dinner induces weight loss.

Camembert here can be stinky if you find the right stuff, but I think it’s kind of “watered down” tasting. I always thought it was because we can only get pasteurized cheese. In France, they can get unpasteurized.

:shrug:

He’s skinny as a rail and eats like a cow, so who am I to disagree.

That’s funny, Endemic. . .it really does smell worse than a bathroom.

5

I can’t tell if the OP hates it or loves it.

6

Aha! So it was you!

7

I didn’t fart, I swear. I just cut the cheese. :smiley:

Actuall, JJ, I do like the cheese.

If you read those reviews at Amazon, they’re written by people who don’t understand cheese at all. One of them THREW THE CHEESE OFF A CLIFF.

If you smell this cheese, you will swear there is NO WAY on earth it is supposed to smell that way.

You will NOT want to put it in your mouth.

You will think, “even though Trunk told me it would smell bad, he couldn’t have meant it smelled this bad” and if you are near a cliff, you will want to throw the cheese off it.

Once it crosses from outside of mouth to inside of mouth, a transformation takes place. It’s creamy. It has a sharp taste, but a pleasant taste. And, it just tastes like cheesy goodness. (can you tell I’m not a food critic?)

The conflict is part of what makes the cheese interesting.

Just get a couple of really good ziploc bags when you buy it.

8

Actually, I will occasionally see a “lait cru” (raw milk) French cheese here. At first I thought they were mildly illegal, but I read somewhere that if a lait cru cheese is aged a minimum number of days (60?), it is legal to sell it in the U.S. I suppose the aging time must give the penicillum candidum time to devour all the bad stuff in the cheese. I do know that cheese labeled “lait cru” will taste much better than other cheeses, so I look for these whenever I’m in a store dealing in imported fromages.

And a pox upon your French BIL, Trunk. People from that country seem to be able to eat whatever and however much they want and still stay skinny. Not fair, no, not fair at all.

9

OK, Trunk, I’ll take your word for it. I won’t even ask for a cite to counter your countercite. I believe you.

And I’ll stick to my 5 year old aged cheddar and be quite happy.

Unless you have some smoked cheddar and aren’t sharing. :slight_smile: