Cheese and Carr’s Table Water Crackers

What cheese blog would be complete without a little attention to cheese’s best friend … the cracker? It is common to find bread or crackers to accompany the serving of cheese. If you are serving a soft cheese, then a cracker, or piece of bread, is almost a necessity to carry the cheese to your mouth.

Honestly, I think that fresh bread, such as a french baguette, is the ultimate cheese carrier with crackers being a close second. Some crackers are better to pair with cheese than others. If you have a mild cheese, you might try marrying it with an exciting cracker full of sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion … you get the idea. But there is a tipping point when cheese looses the stage to such a cracker. At that point why not just spread butter?

A delicate cheese needs a delicate cracker. And that is why I suggest Carr’s Table Water Crackers. They have a nice consistency. They won’t break under the pressure of a knife unless the cheese is atypically stiff. They are a nice size, perfect for two or three bites, unless you have a big appetite, or a big mouth. They are a perfect cracker for brie.

A problem with some crackers is that they have surface salt. The Carr’s crackers do not. I find the baked in salt balance just about perfect. The Carr’s Table Water Crackers can also carry stronger cheeses competently. It is my cracker of choice for Cambozola and other blue cheeses. In fact, it is a great all around cracker for most cheeses.

A box contains about 35 crackers. Carr’s crackers are well distributed and should be widely available. Carr’s Table Water Crackers have my endorsement.

Disclosure: I don’t work for Carr’s or any affiliate. I have not been compensated in any way for this post. I just like ’em.

Rosenborg Castello Blue Cheese

I am a guy that enjoys cheese. It doesn’t have to be fancy, or artisan, although I’m Ok with those too!

I bought a small package of Rosenborg Blue Cheese at a Loblaws. The label looks familiar and you can probably find this cheese most anywhere. I’ve had it before.  Now that I’m blogging about cheese I am “tuned in”. What does that mean? It means I’m paying attention. I notice the color, the texture, the smell and the taste. Instead of a food it is a now a treat.

So I opened the package.

It was vacuum sealed. I’ve been reading about cheese storage (I’ll blog on this soon). The basic idea is that cheese is alive and needs to breathe. This cheese was sealed up tight. I guess that is intended to extend the shelf life but I wonder if that affects the taste. Would a piece of the same cheese, taken from the wheel, taste different than this store package? I don’t have a way to figure that out yet.

I had to put it on a cheese board and lay out a few Carr’s Table Water Crackers. I think if you are going to enjoy a cheese you just have to do this. Would you drink a nice wine from a plastic cup? You could, but it’s not the same as a nice wine glass. I don’t know why that is, but it is.

The taste test – It’s nice. The extra creamy style is noted as being the 4th strongest on a scale of 1 to 5. It is pleasant but certainly not strong. It is creamy. It melts in your mouth. It spreads on a cracker easily. I found it salty. To me this is pretty basic blue cheese. I expect that as I taste other blue cheeses, and do some further comparison, the differences will become more apparent. In summary this was good, good enough for guests but not a wow for me.

Taking it to the next level I explored the website for Rosenborg Castella. The web site was excellent. I was able to navigate to a page specific to the exact cheese I purchased. I was impressed with the claim that “In 1994, Rosenborg-Castello® Extra Creamy Blue was voted the world’s best from among 590 other cheeses.”

Rosenborg Castle

Even more interesting was information about the history of the Rosenborg name which is a reference to a famous Castle in Copenhagen that dates back to the early 17th century. Who knew eating some blue cheese from the supermarket would bring me to understand a piece of 17th century history in Denmark. That’s the beauty of a cheese adventure.