Day 4: Blaue Geiss Bliss

Meet Kisha. On Friday, she drove over from Trenton to bring me her new favorite blue. That’s right, uh huh, she is that cool.

Kisha and I are cheese friends -- she comes to tastings, drops me notes on Facebook, and comments on this blog. When she heard I was launching a Blue Cheese Invitational in March, she was one of the first to say, Count me in.

Then she dropped me a line: “Ever tried Blaue Geiss?”

I hadn’t. Now, I am proud of the fact that I eat a lot of blue cheese, and to be honest, I sit can get a little smug about the fact that I have eaten most, if not all, of the realllly good ones.

Carles Roquefort, check

Colston Bassett Stilton, check

Stichelton, check.

Then along came Kisha with her Blaue Geiss. The girl delivered!

“I read about it in Max McCalman’s book, page 300,” Kisha said when she walked in the door. She handed me a cheese wrapped in paper and sat down at the cutting board I had set out on my table.

“Page 300?” I raised a brow.

“Yup,” she grinned. “It’s rare.”

I retrieved Mastering Cheese from my bookshelf and opened it. There it was, right on p. 300: “…this is an amazing cheese, highly atypical and distinct….”

We dug in.

Blaue Geiss tastes like lightly smoked white chocolate with a crank of white pepper. It’s a raw goat blue with a snow-white paste that is pocked with islands of bluing. The texture is clayey; the mouthfeel, densely fudgy – smooth, bright, crisp, achingly balanced. I was blown away.

I should mention that the rind of this cheese looks like a charred marshmallow. Put it in your “fright wig” category of cheeses, but don’t dwell on the surface. Below that craggy black rind: manna.  

Internet sleuthing reveals little: Blaue Geiss is made by Swiss cheesemaker Willi Schmid and aged by the rockstar affineur Rolf Beeler. Seekers on Chowhound give it a mention, but all other references are in German.

Where can you find this little truffle? Kisha foraged it in Princeton, NJ at Bon Appetit. I wonder if the store owner knows that he’s got rapture in his cheese case.