Clover Blossom Honey Goat Cheese
Cheese that tastes like cheesecake
Texture: creamy, fudgy
Milk type: goat
Flavor notes: sweet honey, tart
Place of origin: Vermont
Somewhere not so deep down, there's a metaphor in the fact that during this amazingly stressful-for-no-particular-reason week, I chose to both bake a sweet-but-tart pie and eat a sweet-but-tart cheese, but I am too spent (again, for no particular reason) to reach for it so I will leave the philosophizing to your magical imagination.
The pie was this Atlantic Beach Pie from NYT Cooking, made with an oyster cracker crust instead of saltine because that's what Balducci's had, which turned out to be an ~inspired~ swap. And the cheese — the real concern here — was Vermont Creamery's Clover Blossom Honey Goat Cheese.
This cheese is very good. It has a soft fudgy texture, just a bit thicker than cream cheese, and the flavor is a super fresh, cohesive balance of rich honey with a slight tang from the goat milk. As far as goat cheeses go, this one is on the mild side. My hunch is that even people who are typically on the fence or don't like goat cheese will like it. It reminds me of cheesecake.
Zooming out, Vermont Creamery is a pretty cool company. Based in Vermont (duh), they buy milk from a network of farms in their home state and Canada and have a strong focus on sustainability and ethics — both as they pertain to the environment and business practices. They are a certified B Corporation and were bought by Land O'Lakes in 2017, which I think is a large part of the reason their distribution is so vast. (The first Vermont Creamery cheese I had was Cremont, a double-cream aged cow and goat milk cheese that blew my mind, found at Whole Foods.)
The company is really solid in their support for artisan cheesemaking — in their 2020 mission report, they note that throughout the pandemic, they never turned down a milk delivery from the small farms that support them regardless of sales, and they are among the founding supporters of Victory Cheese, basically a coalition of people in the cheese industry working to keep American artisan cheesemaking alive.
Anyway, I may be getting too in the weeds here, and capitalism is broadly terrible, but it rules when a large company can both create a good product and maintain their standards. (Yes, I recognize that this is a low bar.)
How To Eat Clover Blossom Honey Goat Cheese
Generally, fresh goat cheese is a nice springtime cheese because it is only aged for a week or so, and in the spring, goats are eating green grass rather than hay, resulting in brighter flavor notes. Since this cheese is perfectly spreadable, I capitalized on that brightness by putting it on a sliced baguette with smashed blackberries on top. Truly, yum. Or use it to top a simple salad with crisp lettuce, sugar snap peas, fresh herbs (basil, dill, maybe even mint?), Maldon salt, a crack of pepper, and a lemon squeeze. I just made that up, but it sounds really nice!
You might also want to balance the sweetness of the honey with some salty prosciutto, a thought that literally makes my mouth water as I recall standing in my brother's kitchen earlier this week wrapping bits of prosciutto around herb goat cheese and eating it just like that.
Want to try some Vermont Creamery Clover Blossom Honey Goat Cheese? You can probably find it at your local grocery store. Vermont Creamery has a product finder on their website that can help you.