Why hello there! And welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where you’ve read that title right, and we’re talking about an advent calendar of Cheese. Why? BECAUSE IT”S THE HOLIDAYS, HAROLD. Good lord, you’re worse than that new Home Alone movie, where they make you side with the Wet Bandits, and then watch as a bratty kid beats the crap out of two people just trying to get their own property back so they can keep their home. Or so I heard. I don’t have time to watch movies, I watch 6 minute YouTube summaries making fun of them and eat CHEESE.

So, basic run down: if you’ve never looked it up, “Advent” is one of those holidays that we don’t really pay attention to any more, wherein for roughly the 4 weeks before Christmas, we’re supposed to do…stuff. What stuff exactly is, as most details are with Christian denominations, contested or confused. Originally, it was a thing where, from November 11th to Christmas, you had to fast 3 days a week, and was basically a second Lent building up to Christmas, like normal Lent does to Easter. That got shortened and swapped around into Advent, where you sing songs, do penance, in Italy they have Bagpipes come play at a shrine, which is a weird way to learn that Italy has a specific ritual involving bagpipes.

Apparently they’re called “Zampogna” in Italian. Or, rather, “there is a specific kind of bagpipe called ‘zampogna’ in Italy”.

But the most famous of the Advent traditions in the modern era is the Advent Calendar, a little device marking the days of Advent (often condensed to just the 24 days of December before Christmas), often hiding things behind little doors. In more religious homes/times, the doors would often hide a small prayer, or part of a liturgical story, to be recited as part of your advent, maybe with a small treat or toy for children who memorized or recited the prayer. This has since evolved into “an advent calendar is a device that dispenses 24 small gifts, as a pre-cursor to Christmas”, and been broadened into all sorts of themes. There are wine advent calendars, spirits advent calendars, video game ones, hunting-related ones, all sorts of themes. My family doesn’t do them every year, but if we see something that catches our eye, we’ll hop on it. So when I was doing the Thanksgiving shopping, and saw that there was ONE “British Cheese Advent Calendar” at Fred Meyers, I snatched it up.

Cheese wreaths: inherently impractical, but oh-so-alluring.

I then left for Leavenworth without grabbing it, so it wasn’t until Sunday that I had it with me, and it wasn’t until Thursday that I had a day off to try it out. So here’s what’s been in my Advent calendar of British cheeses.

Are you Il, Chester?

So this Advent calendar is courtesy of the Ilchester Cheese company, and by “courtesy of”, I mean I was putting on airs: as mentioned, I bought this from a Grocery store. I have not been contacted by, nor have I contacted, the company. This is not an endorsement, or paid ad, yada yada. I mainly bring it up because Ilchester is a rather small but vaguely interesting town in Somerset county: it used to be a “rotten borough”, a term for a royally decreed representative borough (basically the UK version of a “congressional district”) that had become small/sparsely populated enough to be functionally controlled by a single wealthy patron: like, in 1831, a fifth of the entire house of commons had been elected with less than fifty voters. This whole system ended up being undone, as they changed how districts were set-up, and moved to a secret ballot system (so you couldn’t KNOW if people voted the way you paid them to), made bribing people illegal, you know, all the standard 1800’s electoral reform stuff.

The Ilchester Cheese Company is interesting in that it doesn’t actually ‘make’ cheese. In that it is not a dairy farm. Rather, they’re a company that refines other British cheeses, adding flavorings or seasonings. The company started by a man in Ilchester dipping his cheddars in beer to preserve them, before formally mixing the beer (with some chives and spices) into the cheddar and selling it as his own brand of cheese. From there, the basic idea was born. They’ve since been bought by a Nordic dairy company, who own a variety of international cheesemakers (including Jarlsberg, a popular Swiss cheese. (Swiss as in “has holes in it”, as the cheese itself is actually from Jarlsberg Norway…this is one of the problems with cheese being named after their place of invention)).

(Editor’s note: I meant to put a picture here, but I missed it while collecting the images for the post, due to some technical issues, and want to get this up before I leave for work in 15 minutes. So either I’ll come back and get something for here later, or my shame shall stand eternal.)

Now, despite this being a 24 day calendar, the box informs me there are 9 varieties of cheese in it. Thus, for at least 15 days of the calendar, I’m going to be dealing with repeats. (Some calendars are just “a piece of milk chocolate, maybe in a slightly different shape”, so it’s not that bad of a deal.) SO, let’s begin.

DECEMBER 1 – CHEDDAR

“Best before 15 Jan”, so if you can hunt this down within the next couple weeks, at least you’ll know it hasn’t gone bad.

Yeah, that seems like a wise place to start. Give them what they know, eh? The Cheddar is…fine. Edging toward good, I would say. Especially for “internationally shipped advent cheese roughly the size of a string cheese”. I shared some with Joe and Charlie, my hosts in Leavenworth, because A: I didn’t want to eat 9 ounces of cheese on my own, and B: so we could get some opinions in here that weren’t just mine. While serving the cheese, I discovered that, in the tradition of advent calendars having small prayers, this one is loaded with…sigh…CHEESY puns.

It’s like if someone paid me to write popsicle jokes, and then didn’t stop me when I went too far.

I mean, points for creativity, “Hallouminati” (A reference to the Illuminati and Halloumi, a grilling cheese we’ve referenced on the site before) is a BIG swing to lead off with. Like, of the 9 jokes, I can only remember about 6 of them, and it’s been maybe 3 hours since I read them, but damn if that isn’t a powerful introduction.

DECEMBER 2 – Applewood

Weird to highlight the leaf, since the ‘wood’ in this equation is burning.

Technically, this cheese is specifically named “Applewood”, rather than, as I assumed, simply being an “applewood smoked cheddar”. That’s because this isn’t actually smoked at all: it’s blended with liquid smoke. We ate it while it was still a little cold from the fridge, and I have to say, it’s a little more like what I’d expect a good cheddar to be: the texture is a little firmer, a little more crumbly. It doesn’t TASTE of smoke so much as have a kind of smoky roundness to the flavor. It’s a little more complicated than the basic cheddar, a little darker. I don’t know that I like it more, but if feels like there’s more going on.

December 3 –Red Leicester

“Contains Milk”. Important thing to write on Cheese. (They do make vegan cheese, so maybe it’s more useful over there.)

Fun fact about Red Leicester (pronounced ‘red lester’, because England chose to elide the CEs in all their ‘cesters’, because that was a Roman designation they didn’t agree with. That’s why Worcestershire is “wuh-ster-sheer”, Gloucester rhymes with “ouster”, etc): it’s a cheese I’ve actually been mildly interested in trying for like, 2 years. Because it’s been a bit of a meme on “Reverse Engineering”, the Bon Appetit show where one of their chefs tries to recreate dishes he can only try while blindfolded: in the second episode, he tried a burger with Red Leicester, and couldn’t pin-point the flavor: he thought it might be Gruyere, or Emmentaler, he just couldn’t get it, because he wasn’t thinking “British cheeses”, so there were so many other ideas he got first for the same kind of salty sharp notes he was getting. It became a recurring joke, “Could this be a Red Leicester situation? Sure.” So now here’s the moment of truth.

It tastes…weird. Again, these are a little cold, so they’re not at optimal cheese tasting-temp (As noted, there’s almost certainly doubles of every variety, so I can try them room temp later.), but as it stands, this tastes like…store-brand cheddar. It’s not bad, but it’s a little harsher, a little sharper, and not in a way that’s entirely pleasant to my palate. And that’s IMPRESSIVE, given the weird cheeses I like. I openly endorsed a cheese whose flavor palette I most closely associated with “cold chlorinated water”, and this is tastes slightly off to me.

December 4 – Double Gloucester

IF you noticed that the quality of light in the pic is suddenly quite different, apparently I missed a couple pictures last night, and wanted to pull this one out specifically. So spoilers for the 16th.

Double Gloucester is so named because, in Gloucester, they make both Single and Double. Double is firmer, aged longer, and more popular. The theory goes that it has double the milk/the cream is skimmed twice. If you’ve ever had the onion-and-chive studded Cotswold cheese, that’s actually a Double Gloucester with…onions and chives added.

This is a plain one, and it is…the Red Leicester, but creamier. Joe chimed in that he’s getting almost nothing from it, dubbing it the Lacroix of cheese: it’s just faintly cheese flavored. Charlie thought there was something she wasn’t a huge fan of. Joe clarifies that it tastes “like solid cheese whiz”.

December 5th – Mexicana

Mexico does not have a rich history of Cheddar production.

Joe, who enjoys spicy food, is immediately excited to try it, an excitement he confesses collapses somewhat when I characterize it as “let’s see what British people think Mexican food tastes like!”

The result is…not terrible. It’s a little harsh. I’d describe it as “what happens if you add too much taco seasoning to a queso”. Charlie, who apparently isn’t a fan of the flavor of jalapeñoes, notes that it tastes more “Texican”, a very nice culinary burn. Joe likes it, nominating it as his second favorite cheese, after the normal Cheddar.

I pop open a Jarritos soda, to properly enjoy faux-Mexican flavors, and ruin my palette.

Yeah boiiii. Though this was the end of my 12 pack of jarritos, so now I’ve got to go get more.

Which it turns out was the PERFECT time, because the next three are all repeats: the original cheddar (to Joe’s delight), the applewood again, and another Red Leicester. I toss the new Cheddar to Joe, and leave the other two as snacking cheeses for later, as we come to the last one for the day…

December 9th – Vintage Applewood.

Why yes, this IS just the first picture of the Applewood again. Apparently I was REALLY Off my photo game, and that “15 minutes” is now 4, so I don’t have time to hunt down another Vintage Applewood right now.

This is an Applewood cheese based on a more mature cheddar, And honestly, it’s what I expected Applewood to be. This one is not HINTING at smoke. This has a firm smack of smoke to it. Which isn’t bad: as Joe notes, just as the mature cheddar starts to get a little funky, the smoke comes along. Charlie described it as “like if someone put their socks next to the fire to dry”, a great summation of the mild funk and smoke combo.

At which point we were fully caught up, and it was already like, 8 PM, so I put the box away for another day, and ran downstairs to write this up. I’ll probably write up the remaining 3 cheeses we didn’t try, either on the Patreon, or a FB post next week or something. I don’t know, I’m really kind of slapping things together.

MONDAY: WE TALK PRIME RIB, THE PAST, AND PAIN.

THURSDAY: I DO NOT KNOW. I WON’T HAVE THE FULL DAY OFF, SO IT MIGHT BE A LITTLE SHORT.