Leerdammer - smooth and holey

Take yourself back to when you were a wee willy winky (young child). The world is new, magical and wondrous. Your experiences of life are made richer and more interesting every single day as you discover fresh new smells (like cut grass and petrol stations), weird consistencies (like jelly and blancmange) and some of those magical, inexplicable things that the infantile mind is intrigued by (belly-button fluff).

Your inquisitive and information-hungry young mind seeks input from any place it can. The most accessible sources of information tend to be drawn from (1) story-time before bed, (2) tales from friends on the school playground (which have usually been exaggerated beyond measure through Chinese-whisper), and, of course, my personal favourite (3) cartoons.

I may have become acquainted with Leerdammer cheese later on in life, but somehow I can still feel nostalgic about it. It reminds me one of the first impressions I had of cheese picked up from cartoons like Tom & Jerry. All the cartoons do it - yellow pungent cheeses full of holes, whose wavy scents usually lure mesmerised mice into mouse-traps. The only difference is that Leerdammer is not a strong cheese. It is semi-soft and quite mild, and although doesn't have the deep flavours of some of the blues,  I love it. Especially on crackers. And also, much as I have a soft spot for the Dutch football team who for so long have brimmed over with skills but underachieved in major tournaments (like England!), I find myself warmed to this one. Cos let's face it, the French and the English are the heavyweights in world cheese - it's good to see some other nations stepping up to contend. I'll give it a 6 out of ten. This doesn't mean that I don't rate it of course, but I have high expectations!

The other early association I made with cheese was the moon. I haven't yet found one that's like the moon though. There's still time...

The Scoring System

Now I realise that taste is all subjective, and so what I like will not necessarily be an experience shared with others. So I thought it was worth defining the direction to which my taste buds sway. 


To be perfectly honest, there are not many foods or flavours that I actively dislike. And that's kind of saying something considering I have eaten cow intestine, locusts and snake in the past. And you may have guessed - I am a 'love' Marmite guy. Those foods that really don't float my boat though include: anchovies, vinegar (including salt and vinegar crisps), artichoke and liquorice (I mean, why would you!?). So the fact that I like most foods out there means that I am pretty open minded to the cheeses that I'm trying. 


Nevertheless, everyone has a biased tongue for certain flavours and textures - which is incidentally why I love cheese! But I think I have to say that I am probably drawn more towards (1) the soft & smooth cheeses like Brie and Camembert; and (2) the stinky, smelly strong cheeses like the Stiltons and the blues. Oh baby! It's the dry cheeses that I don't favour as much, but I will try to be as unbiased as possible in trying to score some of these cheeses. After all, all cheeses suit different moods and compliment different foods that surround them. And the dry cheeses are very good in salads for example. 


So I'll be scoring from 1 to 10, with ten being the supercalifragelisticexpialidocious cheeses and one being those that I think taste like poo (not that I have). This will help me to remember those that I love in order to keep them in my cheese stock, and if anyone else is interested, then they can go out and try some as well! Let's get scoring.