Creamy creamy cream cheese

Under ordinary circumstances, I don't even like cream cheese, unless it's in a cheesecake. On a bagel, oh, ugh, maybe just the tiniest, most microscopically thin scraping, I suppose. But in the context of S.'s birthday present, we got a pound of Zingerman's cream cheese, and let me tell you, that is some seriously good shit.

It turns out that if someone just goes ahead and makes cream cheese all nice and fresh, instead of whipped up with gums and preservatives, it is incredibly, mindblowingly good. The simplest, dippiest combination of strawberry jam and some of this cream cheese on bread makes my eyes roll up into my head. I can only imagine what it would be like for someone who already enjoyed the stuff you get in supermarkets and bagel shops.

It does cost $10 a pound, plus shipping, however, which is a pretty substantial premium over a block of Philly. But $10 is not really so very much money for the amount of pleasure we're getting out of it. Still, it's going to keep us from buying it nearly as often as we would enjoy eating it (perhaps, on further contemplation, not an entirely bad thing, but still). If I could find a more local source for such fresh, utterly clean, handmade cream cheese, that would be really exciting. On the other hand, with that much of the good stuff, I might be transformed into a crazed proselytizer, force-feeding cream cheese to everyone I know.

Posted by redfox at April 26, 2003 10:35 AM (etcetera)

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