Mmm...Blue Cheese

I love it on burgers, but I hate it on salads.

The LA Times has a great article about new American variations of blue cheese. If you don't like this article, you're against America.

Simultaneously creamy, crumbly, sweet and salty, these new blues are anything but an acquired taste. They're sophisticated and nuanced but still accessible. You can eat them on a cracker or showcase them in recipes, and always you get unique flavor, mellow but sharp, with all the hallmarks of a superb Burgundy. They even seem to induce wine-speak, with aficionados finding hints of berries and caramel and hazelnuts in a single buttery bite.

Like all the great pungent, veiny cheeses, the new Americans go with everything you want to eat right now: pecans and pears, apples and walnuts, cranberries and bitter greens, grilled beef and roast pork, even pasta and polenta. The flavor, the texture and the creaminess harmonize with nearly every other brink-of-winter ingredient, and that's before you even get out the Port.

A category of cheese essentially dominated for 64 years by Maytag Blue out of Iowa now includes variations from coast to coast: from California to New York and Massachusetts, with stopovers in Colorado and Louisiana and Vermont. Terroir is a pretentious word, but tasting these cheeses can give you a hint of how connected the Oregon grass the cows eat is to the Crater Lake blue you spread on a sliced baguette.

Click here to read the rest of the LA Times article...