Before you assume this is gonna be all snobby and preachy, let me share a fun fact about myself – my standards, when it comes to food (etc) are erratic at best.
My standards remain consistently chaotic when it comes to cheese. I never turn my nose up at that plastic cheese when the opportunity arises, nor do I find fancier blue cheese offensive on thy nose holes.
Why should I? Plenty of the best food out there has a pungent aroma and blue cheese is at the top of that list.
I don’t want to call out individuals specifically here, but I have a strong suspicion that the people who hate blue cheese are the same culprits who think it’s fine and dandy to boil an egg in the microwave.
I’d also wager that most people who claim to hate blue cheese have never actually tried it in their entire lives. Just picky children stuck in a fully-formed adult body, it seems.
I bet someone else’s first born that these people have the following conversation whenever they travel to somewhere slightly more exotic than The Shire:
“Do you want some of my [insert anything that’s slightly spicy/pungent here]?”
“Ugh, no, I can’t stand it.”
“Oh, when did you last have it?”
“I haven’t, just, you know, ick.”
I can try time and time again to encourage people to be more adventurous – YOLO, etc – but food is a particularly sore spot for a lot of people.
Block your nose and take a bite. Mix it into a soup. Get someone to shove it in your gob when you’re sleeping, for all I care. Just don’t knock the cheese until you try it.
Call me biased because the particular blue cheese I’d propose to with a 24kt diamond ring, Castello, is almost the same as my last name, but partial narcissism aside – that cheese is the bombdiggitydoowop.
Reasons to fall madly in love with blue cheese and have a better relationship with it than that burnout you’ve been dating for six years because you’re used to it and you can’t see a way out:
- Once the initial smell subsides, it’s the richest food – not just cheese, food – you’ll ever taste in your goddamn life.
- Its flavour is heavy on the salt, the most crucial ingredient in any good dish.
- It will ruin you for other cheeses. After blue, you’ll have a bite of cheddar and wait for the taste to hit, but that taste will never come.
- It’s easy to portion control because it’s so delightfully intense.
Reasons to hate blue cheese more than you do yourself:
- Well this is a trick because you can’t hate anything more than you hate yourself.
To be fair, it looks like Castello has cut more slack for you lot than I have, because they’ve even brought out these blue cheese minis, so the unacquainted can have a tiny taste test before they inevitably buy 4kgs of the stuff.
As the old saying goes: you don’t hate blue cheese, you hate change.
And puppies.
