CHEESE WEEK DAY 4: Oven Baked Bread Cheese

Ok, so Cheese Week turned into Cheese Three Days Then a Month Then Another Day. Sorry. Anyway, here’s more cheese coffee.

I still had some bread cheese left. I’d heard it’s good with brown sugar and cinnamon baked on. I had the brilliant idea of topping coffee with a layer of the cheese, topping that with cinnamon and sugar, broiling it in the oven, then having a lovely crust to sip the coffee through, giving it just a hint of the cheesey brilliance before finishing it off with a soon.

I soon realized that there was not a large enough slice of cheese left to cover the whole ramekin (yes that’s a real word; look it up), and it wouldn’t be much of a “crust” if it immediately sank to the bottom. Thus, I drafted up and implemented a complex cheese apparatus, with smaller bits of cheese acting as supports to keep the larger slice aloft.

Of course, now is when this cheese finally decides to get its melt on. It immediately collapsed to the bottom of the coffee.

Regardless of its structure, it smelled delicious. But, well, you put anything with cinnamon in an oven, and it’s going to smell great. Luckily, this lived up to its smell. I had to use a spoon, treating it more like soup than coffee, but oh what gooey goodness.

This reminded me a lot of French Onion soup, in texture and even in taste; it’s a bit less salty, more sweet, but it’s got that delightful soggy melted cheese flavour that the French refer to as merde fondu dans ma bouche.¹

People with less adventurous pallets would probably be turned off by this unusual combination of flavours. But when you think about it, coffee, cheese, and cinnamon all have an earthy quality to them. In fact, next time I do this, I’ll leave out the sugar and add some cognac, further emphasizing that this works better as a soup than a dessert coffee.

All of these bread cheese experiments have been successful. I give it my serious recommendation. If juustoleipa isn’t available where you live (as it isn’t here), I’m sure other cheeses could be substituted. Swiss, Gruyere or emmenthal could have similar results. And as we saw, cheddar has its place in coffee.

Thanks again to Monica Wright for the bread cheese and continual awesomeness. And thanks to you, Internet, for your incoming suggestions. Got more? Got enough for a whole other week of coffee experiments? Send them in.

¹ No they don’t.