Just the other day I bought a couple of new cheeses at the alternate Shop-Rite, and then brought them home and gave them a try. Then when I checked out my blog post history, I got a surprise. Unless I made a mistake, it's been almost exactly a year since my last post about a cheese. Which is shocking, since cheese is my favorite food, period. Anyway, I tried the muenster cheese from the Finlandia brand.
The history of the company behind Finlandia is a little hit and miss. The Finlandia brand of cheese started in the late 1970's, by an unnamed company. (Maybe the company was also named Finlandia?) Nothing more was mentioned until this brand was bought up by the Valio Ltd. company in 1992. We do know more about Valio. This company began in 1905, and was headquartered in Hanko, Finland. It was a cooperative of many small Finnish dairy farms. Initially this business just sold butter, but in 1909 they also started marketing other dairy products, such as cheese. In the 1950's Valio began exporting cheese to the U.S. Currently Valio is huge--according to an article I read it's responsible for 97% of Finland's dairy exports, and 29% of the nation's overall food exports. In addition to the cheeses and butter put out under the Finlandia line, Valio also makes baked goods, pastries, candy, chocolates, ice cream, other special nutrition dairy products, and formula for infants. Finlandia consists of 4 categories: sliced cheeses such as Swiss, gouda, and havarti; salted and unsalted butter; spreadable cheeses and cheese chunks; "deli loaves," which seem to be cheeses in bar form, and not sliced. Moving on, Finlandia's cheeses are free of gluten (as all cheese are?). Some are free of lactose, and use a vegetarian-friendly rennet. None of their cheeses are kosher. Oddly, their butters are kosher. Recent annual total sales of Valio products are reported as being 1.8 billion Euros. The company exports to between 50-60 nations around the globe.
I always assumed from the name that muenster cheese was German in origin. It isn't. It's actually American, although made by German immigrants, in an unrecorded year and place within the U.S.A. The cheese has nothing to do with the German city of Munster in Westphalia/Lower Saxony, nor the Irish province of Munster. It's actually named for the Alsatian city of Munster. For those that don't know, Alsace is a disputed territory--both France and Germany have claimed it at various points in history, and its culture is thus a mix of the two. Anyway, muenster cheese is a semisoft cheese, pale in color, with a distinctive orange rind, which is derived from one of its seasonings, annetto (which is also used for making cheddar and colby cheese, among others). It's made from pasteurized cow's milk, and its taste is thought to be mild (although if aged longer its flavor is more intense). As it melts well it's often used for grilled cheese sandwiches, and for tuna melts, etc. The original Munster cheese, with no "e" in the name, is made in the Alsatian town of the same name, but is unpasteurized.
Finlandia muenster cheese: Had a pale yellow color, with a orangish rind. Plain it was delicious. Semisoft texture, mild, and creamy. I also had some melted on a roll, and this was also excellent. So the search for a kind of bad cheese continues. This one was very tasty. Buy it if you can, unless you're one of those rare folks who doesn't like cheese, or doesn't eat it for other reasons.
One final note--Valio had a very famous and lauded employee. Artturi Ilmari Virtanen worked in their labs, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945. It was for his "research and invention in agriculture and nutrition chemistry, especially for his fodder preservation method preserving nutrition in hay." Meaning the cows had better food, and then were able to produce better, and presumably more, milk for use in dairy products.
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