After a two-week hiatus to refresh our palettes and rekindle our lust for soft cheese, we put the four qualifiers from the group stages – together with the wildcard entrant I can now reveal is the ash-covered soft cheese “Petit Grey” – into a gruelling multi-day head-to-head contest.

We went for an aggressively min-maxed tall cracker build focused around a deep stack of Holly’s Wheat Crackers (having finally learned that none of the other Holly’s Crackers are any good with these cheeses). We also included standard Tesco Sea Salt Crackers and Stockarn’s Oatcakes in the sideboard. We tried the cheeses alone, on crackers, on bread, and with varying degrees of thermalization from 3 hours to 45 mins. Given the generally higher quality of the cheeses here, and the more diverse selection, assessing them was vastly more challenging than previous rounds, where a clear winner had often emerged in a few short bites. Here are the results.

Époisses

The elite-soft-cheese-board equivalent of getting into a prolonged conversation at a party with someone who works on the biological weapons program of a Middle Eastern state with a questionable human rights record: they are very passionate, the work is technically impressive, but the whole experience just leaves you feeling a bit uneasy. This cheese has a strongly farmy flavour – it’s certainly the most intense farmyard experience on this board – but we came to the cruel realisation that, compared to all the other cheeses here, this level of brutalizing farminess is just not that enjoyable to eat. Spread very, very thinly on a cracker or a thick bit of crusty bread and this is interesting and complex, but the Brie de Meaux, surprisingly, occupies the farm slot a little bit less offensively.

Petit Grey

On crackers or bread this wildcard entry compared poorly to the other cheeses available; no surprises there, as it hadn’t been put through the aggressive winnowing process of the group stages. As a standalone snack cheese, though, this was a shock hit thanks to its satisfying bouncy texture, nonthreatening flavour and no-nonsense consumability. This “snack ash” cheese (colloquially: “snash”) was actually the first cheese eaten to completion on this board; cries of “I’m just getting a bit more snash” resonated at regular intervals through our household for the approximately one afternoon of its tenure in the house.

This cheese is an ash-coated soft cheese with a white-grey rind, made from pasteurised cow’s milk. It’s quite firm and extremely mild – similar to a fairly bland Brie in terms of flavour, but quite a bit less creamy and more rubbery. Without the ash-covered rind this would be a pretty dull cheese, but the rind gives it a slightly tougher and more satisfying exterior, as well as hopefully providing essential trace nutrients. This is tedious on a cracker, but it’s pretty good as a simple snack cheese thanks to its firm texture and ease of cutting and transportation.

Brie de Meaux

This strong Brie put up an unexpectedly tasty showing, narrowly avoiding missing out on a spot in the top 2. Much to our surprise, it duelled head-to-head on flavour with the Époisses and came out on top; while the Époisses had a slightly stronger flavour and a much more raucous stench, that came with a rather unpleasant aftertaste, and the overall experience was a bit too overwhelming. The BdM reigned in the more feety flavours while still being complex and tasty.

Saint Félicien

This is a mild, smooth cheese fortified with double cream for an absurdly decadent experience. The texture is amazing on both crackers and bread, and I found the taste great in its mild way. In some ways this was more enjoyable to eat than the Chaource and it was very hard to decide between the two. Its downside is its one-dimensional nature: its entire focus is on the creaminess, so it’s not especially flavourful or complex, and only a madman would contemplate eating this unaccompanied.

Chaource

Long deliberation led us to eventually decide this probably was the best cheese on this board, though it was a hard-fought battle against both the Saint Felicien and – surprisingly – the Brie de Meaux. Chaource simply has the superior flavour: complex and interesting but not farmy; also the superior texture: complex, multi-faceted and changeable.

Interestingly the Chaource triumphed although, in my considered opinion, this particular specimen was rather sub-par, even in comparison to its Tesco littermate we ate 2 weeks earlier. It really was almost unpleasantly lemony and acidic, giving it a stronger but less enjoyable taste than most Chaources I’ve eaten. That made awarding the final crown a really tough decision. In some ways the Saint Flicien was more enjoyable to eat, but suffered for its excessively linear flavour experience. The Chaource shot for the moon in terms of both flavour and texture complexity, impressed even where it fell short, and just provided an impressively varied eating experience.

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