Beyond describing how it tastes, which is fabulous, I have a few things to say about this little beauty. It’s perfectly sized to share on Valentine’s Day, so there’s that. It’s definitely a contender for my favorite triple-cream cheese. In its country of origin, it’s a style maverick and you have to admire that. But then there’s the little matter of the price.
I didn’t quite realize what I had paid until I got home and glanced at the store receipt. Ouch—$15.99 for a 150-gram cheese. I’ll do the math for you. That’s roughly $48 a pound.
I love Moser Screamer, this petite puck of utter lusciousness from Switzerland. I love that it’s a total stylistic departure from what most consumers think of as Swiss cheese. Ueli Moser wasn’t the first Swiss cheesemaker to make cream-enriched soft cheese, but as a former Emmentaler producer who flipped completely to the soft side, he is a risk taker and likely unique.
A lot of triple-cream cheeses just taste like whipped salted butter and I tire of them quickly. Moser Screamer has plenty of salt but it also has a deep mushroomy, yeasty, sour-cream flavor that keeps you coming back. The rind is thin and tender—you wouldn’t dream of not eating it—and the interior spreads like buttercream frosting. Who wouldn’t love this?
By my records, the price has climbed by one-third in seven years. Transportation costs certainly figure into that. Like many fragile cheeses with short lifespans, it travels by air from Switzerland. Then it has to cross the country to get to me. We can all point to consumer products that have gone up that much in price or more. But I worry that fine cheese may be reaching the limits of what the average cheese-loving shopper will pay.
Kunik | Photo: Nettle Meadow
And it’s not just imports. A sales rep for a large distributor told me that domestic creameries are raising prices even faster. Nettle Meadow’s Kunik, a goat’s milk triple cream from New York, is comparably priced to Moser Screamer, or even higher. A spike in the cost of heavy cream over the past couple of years has raised production costs for triple-cream cheeses, which depend on cream-enriched milk.
Cowgirl Creamery just announced that it’s reducing the size of its popular triple-cream Mt. Tam—from 8 ounces to 7 ounces—in lieu of a price increase. But unless retailers drop the price to consumers, that’s a price increase. The company cites higher costs for organic milk, packaging, labor and energy. I get it. But it makes me anxious, wondering if more people are going to decide that their dinner doesn’t need that cheese course after all.
Moser Screamer’s importer, Caroline Hostettler of Quality Cheese, told me that the name refers to people crying out with delight when they taste it. But these days, for some of us, the cost of such pleasure can pinch.
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