If i could only give one piece of advice in regard to camping cheese, it would be this: avoid cheddar. the worst is the cheap, generic cheddar, which turns to moist, crumbly shag carpeting after about 18 hours. when i was camping in washington this summer, i brought a pound of fancy wisconsin three-year cheddar because i thought it would be dry enough to withstand three or four days of hiking. wrong! the cheese experienced a major malfunction sometime during the morning of day 2, and i miserably choked and gagged on it for the next week. the best camping cheeses are the parmesans and dry goudas. why didn't i bring them? who knows? it maybe had something to do with the fact that i was wickedly hungover when i was shopping. there are some within the backpacking community who believe that the cheese argument has been moot since the creation of individually wrapped mozzerella sticks. i would like to point out that (a) i can't find any documentation proving that those sticks are actually cheese and not some partially hydrogenated facsimilie, and (b) they have this nasty, flaccid, rubbery quality that is un-food-like and frankly repulsive. as far as the best camping cheeses: argentine parmesan is cheap and not too crumbly like its sister the reggiano. old amsterdam is clearly packed with the sweet sweet sodium that i crave on the trail. any of the asiago family are reasonable; i'm 'bout em, even if they're not as tangy or tasty as the others. remember, avoid cheddar. avoid it!
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2 replies on “Camping with cheese”
I think parmesan is the all-around best camping cheese, and here I'm going to disagree with Doug and say that I think reggiano is better for camping because you get the thicker rind, and we all know you can use the rind to make plain camp stew taste a lot better, particularly if the bouillon cube purchased to flavor the stew gets lost and you are faced with the prospect of starchy food with no salt. Also, if a big storm leaves you stranded for days in a port-a-ledge on the side of an enormous mountain, you can stick a little piece of rind on a fork and hold a match or a lighter to it and make it all melty and yummy for a treat. That happens to me a lot when I go camping.
Let me start by saying that Reggiano is a great cheese. There is no question of that. But here are three things that you need from a camping cheese: open-ended preservability, salty taste, and structural integrity. The Reggie will keep forever, and is plenty salty, so the first two are satisfied. But it tends to crumble when being cut, especially after being packed in and jostled with other food for 4–5 days. I will say this: It is profoundly upsetting to lose crumbs of cheese that you've carried for 75 miles. You only need to spend a few minutes tweezing Reggie crumbs off the ground in the Russian Wilderness before you say decide to bring a lower quality, but more structurally sound cheese the next time.