Jarlsberg cheese
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Jarlsberg cheese (pronounced YAHRLZ-berg) is a mild Swiss-style cheese that has large irregular holes. It comes from Norway and has a yellow-wax rind and a semifirm yellow interior. The texture is buttery rich and the flavor is mild and slightly sweet. It's an all-purpose cheese that's good both for cooking and for eating as a snack.
The history of this cheese can be traced back to the middle 1850s. The creator of the cheese was Anders Larsen Bakke (1815-1899), a local farmer/entrepreneur in the Våle village in Vestfold county, some 80 km south of Oslo. Bakke was a pioneer in introducing the dairy industry in Norway, and the cheese was named "Jarlsberg" because "Jarlsberg & Larviks Amt" was the name of the county until 1918, when it was renamed with its old name "Vestfold". The cheese (and Bakke's accomplishments) was first noted in the annual county report of Jarlsberg & Larviks Amt 1855. Production was discontinued in the early 1900s, and the cheese was only re-invented by professor Ola Martin Ystgaard of the Agricultural University of Norway in the late 1950s.
The oft-repeated notion that the cheese was invented/developed or even at any time produced at the Jarlsberg estate (some 20 km to the south of the village of Våle), is a pure cock-and-bull story. The origin of that myth might be explained as a simple name confusion, probably also enhanced by the vain idea that this noble cheese must somehow be related to the barons who once inhabited that impressive estate.
Starting out in 1956, Ystgaard and some of his students tried to recreate the cheese. After a lot of samples they came up with the recipe that is used today. The production of cheese began in the 1960s and today it is one of the best known cheeses on the market. In the United States alone it sells in over 30,000 supermarkets.
Largest producer of Jarlsberg today is the Tine Meierier factory in Elnesvågen in western Norway.
Jarlsberg is also available in the following varieties:
- Jarlsberg Lite
- Smoked Jarlsberg
External links
- Official site (http://www.tine.no/intprod/4812/)