The first time I saw someone put a slice of cheddar cheese on top of their apple pie, I thought it was weird. That was half-a-century ago. Now, although I still don’t put cheese on my apple pie, I frequently eat cheese with apple because it’s such a wonderful combination of rich/tart, sweet/creamy, crisp/soft.
I decided to do a taste test of apples and cheese. The Oak Park Farmers’ Market – at stands like Nichol’s and Skibbe’s – has an incredible range of different types of apples to choose from.
I bought Northern Spy, Macintosh and Granny Smith, just to see which would go better with cheese. I’m not suggesting that these are incredibly exotic selections; I was just trying to set a baseline to test other apples against.
For the cheese, I chose a Castello aged Havarti, which was not super strong (didn’t want to overwhelm the apple), but had some depth of flavor and so would be interesting to sample with apple. I think a medium-hard, flavorful but not overwhelming cheese, is the way to go when pairing with apples: milder cheese are boring (to me) and strong cheeses would seem to conflict with apples. Here are my results:
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The Northern Spy was pretty good, balanced with sweet and tart flavors. The texture was very firm, which I liked against the softness of the cheese.
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The Macintosh was too mushy; the texture of the fruit was very similar to the cheese, which didn’t provide enough contrast. It was also a little too sweet for my taste.
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Granny Smith is an apple that I usually don’t select, but I ended up liking it best with the cheese. Probably the tartest of the bunch, I liked the way it cut through the richness of the cheese, which was shown to good advantage with this apple.
Now, this is a small test, and there are undoubtedly many good apples available at the Oak Park Farmers’ Market, which will be open for one more Saturday this year: tomorrow.