The independent guide to Bavarian cheese in America
A blue cheese dressed for the evening. Grand Noir is hand-dipped in black wax and cold-ripens in the dark — dark blue marbling through a pale, spoonable paste, with medals…
Before Cambozola, before Rougette — there was a camembert in a tin, and it smelled faintly of mushrooms. In 1908 Julius Hirschle’s camembert gave the company its name. This tin…
Seven petals, one wheel. Fiorella di Tomino is Champignon’s showpiece soft cheese: a triple-cream wheel molded into a seven-petaled flower, with a crème-fraîche flavor. Created in 2018, it reached America…
The same fresh-pack trick as its mild sibling, with a whisper of blue culture folded in. Champignon’s answer to the shopper who wants to like blue cheese but doesn’t want…
“It’s not brie — it’s Briette.” A 4.4-ounce wheel that arrives at perfect ripeness every time thanks to an individual fresh-pack seal. Sweet milk, mild rind, zero intimidation.
Same cheese, colder cellar, grayer rind, louder blue. Cambozola Black Label is the Classic’s older sibling — aged 4½ weeks at lower temperatures until a different mold strain turns the…
If Cambozola is Bavaria’s most famous blue, Bavaria Blu is its most German one: the triple-crème blue from Bergader, the family-owned soft-cheese market leader, introduced in 1972 — a full…
“Butter cheese” is a promise, and this one keeps it. Butterkäse is the mild, creamy, endlessly meltable semi-soft cheese that Germany invented in 1928 by borrowing an Italian idea —…
A Camembert–Gorgonzola hybrid named for a Roman settlement, sold to Americans as “blue brie,” and crowned Grand Champion at the 2012 World Cheese Awards. Cambozola shouldn’t work — it’s a…
The most famous smelly cheese in the world is a Bavarian immigrant. Limburger was born in the Duchy of Limburg — the Herve area of what is now Belgium, where…