WHAT IS HAVARTI?
So if you have whiny kids, melt some havarti on toast and watch their palettes grudgingly expand. This block of cheese looks like a loaf of yellow bread with lots of tiny eye holes. It is soft but firm enough to peel for a thin slice in a nice cucumber and dill sandwich.
The cow’s milk is highly pasteurized and enriched with extra cream ergo the “creamy” part. Creamy Havarti is a very mild and buttery cheese. It is very enfant terrible-friendly (unless your kids are being jerks, then start looking through some adoption brochures in front of them and see what happens).
WHERE IS HAVARTI MADE?
It was invented in Denmark by Ms. Hanne Nielsen in the 19th century (couldn’t have been easy being a female entrepreneur in the late 1800s). After touring around Europe, she returned to her family farm and came up with this ost (cheese). Today the Danes make so much of it that even industrial dairy behemoths like Wisconsin and New Zealand have trouble competing.
“WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOLE WHEN THE CHEESE IS GONE?”
This famous question was posed by German author Bertolt Brecht a century ago. Questioning the nature of our reality, even with a wheel of cheese, was not unusual. One famous thought experiment illustrated this debate using the life and death of Schrödinger’s poor cat. The more mundane answer is don’t worry. So long as cheese is worth more then the price of milk, Denmark will always make more!
WHAT CAN I PAIR THIS OST (CHEESE) WITH?
Sadly Alissa Nutting in her book Made for Love was right when she said “Melted cheese is a culinary veil…a foxhole where mediocrity can hide.” I would not suggest putting this on a cheese board or pairing it to wine. Throw some havarti in a salad or melt it in a grilled cheese.