Fro Sourdough With Sea Salt Crackers (Tesco)

Seldom does a fairly plain cheese cracker provide such a rollercoaster ride of dashed hopes and unexpected joys. I initially purchased these primarily to sneer at their aggressively hipster marketing – all jaunty arrows, umlautted Scandinavian heritage and hygge  – only to be floored by their deliciously restrained flavour and texture. I wrote a gushing review proclaiming these “knock every aspect of a good cheese biscuit of the park”. However, gratemycheese.com is no run-of-the-mill cheese lifestyle website for dilettante dairy fans. As part of the rigorous quality assurance step (where I ate a second box) I was fairly disappointed and surprised by the overbaked nature and resulting lacklustre experience. That suggests that at their peak these biscuits can be outstanding, but their quality depends strongly on the batch you receive, so it is hard to recommend them unreservedly.

I have previously discussed “tall” vs “wide” cheese biscuit builds; these could form the bedrock of a “tall” approach. They have a very clear cheeseboard niche: a simple yet flavoursome biscuit which will pair well with anything, without their own excessively dominant taste yet without being bland and tedious.

The texture is generally excellent: a delicious brittle snap, thanks to the extremely thin nature of the biscuit. The flavour is the slightly sour, earthy flavour of sourdough, tantalisingly present but fading into the background. The large salt grains attached liberally (as befits such a Scandinavian cracker) but not excessively to these biscuits enhance the flavour of anything they mate with, without overwhelming milder cheeses. In the second batch, while texture remained good the flavour was far too burnt and lost the subtle complexity of the first batch; these simply became a rather mundane plain cheese cracker.

Good cheese biscuits should have a great texture and perform the simple task of ferrying tasty cheese into my body in large quantities while getting out of the way flavour-wise. These biscuits perform competently at all aspects of that role. They are satisfying but not too gratuitous as a solitary savoury snack; they pair well with mild soft cheeses where they yield a hint of sourdough flavour; their saltiness lets stronger hard cheeses shine. They can be moreish, salty and satisfyingly crunchy without the unhealthy addictive gorging promoted by something like Ritz crackers; we consumed the first box in scant hours, but the second box was rather unappealing to eat as a snack.

Often, cheese biscuits try and fly too close to the sun, aiming for a complex or impressive flavour which battles with the cheese which is the real star of the show. We suffered this bad experience with the M&S onion crackers which dueled horribly with some of the cheeses we tried to pair them with. These biscuits have a simpler, milder flavour, and should go well with almost everything. As part of a tall biscuit selection, I would probably extend these with something thicker and less salty (such as oatcakes or digestives), and something a bit more feisty (some sort of herb cracker, say, or a devilish flair of black pepper).

Philip

I love cheese. Most of all I love the strongest Cheddars available; ewe’s or goat’s cheese are also often hits.