BRUNOST

My tired eyes gazed blankly through the restaurant’s floor to ceiling windows that overlooked the busy plaza in front of Oslo’s bustling City Center train station. I was deep in thought contemplating if it was safe to take a second sip of coffee yet. My first had felt akin to licking fresh molten lava just spewed from an active volcano and I thought it might be a good idea to not scald the rest of my tastebuds on just the second full day of our Scandinavian trip. 

I was aware my wife came back from the fancy breakfast buffet, and I knew she said something, but I was deep into vacation mode, enjoying how my movements seemed to be in slow motion compared to the locals hustling through the chilly morning rain shower to the chaotic confluence of trains, trams and buses just across the street. I assumed I had not heard her correctly but then she repeated, “Did you try the brown cheese?” I paused for another few seconds pondering the concept of brown cheese. I guess she really did say that.

Having already rudely not answered her question promptly the first time, I decided to just honestly reply with a quick ‘no’, versus launching into a usual Dan schtick riff about how unpleasant the term ‘brown cheese’ sounded. Early mornings are not the best time to test my wife’s tolerance and patience, especially when she’s a bit jetlagged and there’s still a week’s worth of close quarters travel to come. Though that did not stop my hippocampus from stepping up to a smokey spotlight lit microphone on a dark small stage inside my brain, to do a stream-of-consciousness mental monologue about brown cheese within my head.

“Browwwwwn cheeeeeeese” said my inner-thought comedian in a drawn-out wacky sardonic voice, “is that made from the same cows that give chocolate milk? The last time I saw brown cheese was when I emptied my Aunt Gertrude’s refrigerator four weeks after she died in the blackout. I think a nasty case of noxious growing ‘brown cheese’ was what my mom threatened would develop if I did not regularly clean my belly button. I bet that little fancy card next to the brown cheese with all the goofy Æs and Øs actually translates to ‘dumb tourist poison’ and is a decades old Viking practical joke played on unsuspecting non-Norwegian speaking guests. I think I heard Chef Olaf mockingly saying ‘Loooooooooka  anuuuder dum Aaamereecan ate da steeenkee browwwwn cheeeeese’…”

Eventually, my mind’s decidedly un-PC inner comic got fed-up with the tepid audience response from my brainstem (that auto-pilot top of my spinal column never gets my deeper-thought frontal lobe’s complex jokes) and quit the act before getting booed off my cerebral stage. Returning focus to the real world, I strongly blew on my coffee like I was rushing to test the results of a birthday cake wish. Then after safely taking a sip, I politely asked ‘so what exactly is the brown cheese?’ My wife replied, “I’m not sure, but it’s really good”.

I absolutely trust her opinion on these matters; I’m usually the one in the couple more likely to steer the other down an unpleasant alley saying things like ‘this tastes awful, do you want to try some” or “do you want to smell the milk, I think its rotten.” So, when I later got up to get a refill of scalding coffee, I used the supplied handheld slicer to lop off some of the odd textured brown cheese. Then on my way back to the table I grabbed another irresistible croissant. I didn’t really need to eat another croissant but after my brain had finished its lame brown cheese comedy act, it had started looking for ways to rationalize the high room rate we paid to stay at that opulent hotel and apparently loading up on the included fancy breakfast buffet was how it saw fit to do so.

Before the trip, I had assumed the memorable food options we would find at our various hotel’s breakfasts would be things like kippers, herring, lutefisk, or the ridiculously popular open-faced shrimpy smørbørd sandwiches. Or maybe sausage made from locally popular reindeer meat (that stuff creeps out my wife so I did not talk about it out loud, but you should have heard my brain’s mental comedy set about Blitzen Jerky and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Hot Dog.  I did eventually try reindeer… it did NOT taste like chicken). Who knew that the food we would get hooked on during the trip and would reminisce about the most after we got home, would be the delicious brown cheese called Brunost.

The omnipresent funky Brunost has a caramel-esque sweet and savory sort of taste. It comes in a uniform block with the consistency and look of tan modeling clay. And from what we saw, you are always to use a Norwegian invented handled cheese slicer to cut it. Though the name literally translates to ‘brown cheese’, it technically is not a cheese at all.  Its main ingredient is the byproduct whey, that is leftover after the curds used to make cow’s milk cheeses, have been removed. Goat’s milk is added to that leftover whey and boiled till the watery moisture has evaporated and the remaining milk sugars have turned into a brownish gold caramel mass.

Brunost is a common local staple popular all over Norway and a block of it with a nearby slicer was available at every breakfast we had in the country. The stuff is so beloved that last year when the Norwegian ambassador became head of the UN Security Council, she gifted blocks of it to all the other members. Solbrasetra, the original farm where Anne Hov first invented the stuff in 1863, has become a national landmark. Traditionally, curls of it, sliced directly from the block, are eaten atop thin slices of knekkebrod crisp bread. But nowadays it’s everywhere there, even used as a pizza topping, ice cream flavor, stroganoff ingredient, and dessert topping.  And although fairly unknown in the US, it’s become wildly popular in a handful of other countries like South Korea.

There is also a less traditional somewhat similar tasting softer version that comes in a toothpaste-like tube. Which is not surprising, because in the region many food items come in squeeze out tubes. The most popular is Mill’s brand Norwegian Kaviar, which is basically a mushy paste made of lightly smoked and sugar salted cod roe that people squirt out directly onto bread or crackers.

They had several versions of the fishy tube stuff in the Oslo airport snoot lounge. I tried a few that were kinda’ tasty, once you got over the concept of squirting heavily processed mushed fish eggs from a toothpaste-like tube. My wife caught a whiff of the stuff and decided it was not really for her. I also saw several squirt pastes of flavored mayonnaise, cheesy shrimp, and bacon cheese mixtures. Area supermarkets and convivence stores have entire refrigerated sections dedicated to foods and condiment in tubes. I kept thinking of the great practical jokes I could play switching someone’s Crest or Colgate with a tube of fish goo.

A couple of weeks after we got home from our vacation, I flew down to Florida alone for the weekend to see my family. When I got back home, I noticed something new in the refrigerator, a small block of Brunost. We have not opened it yet, but I am hoping when I try it, it triggers one of those memory experiences and takes me back to that breakfast in Oslo when I first tried it. Just with less of a coffee-burned tongue.  Maybe next time my wife’s away, I’ll track down one of those toothpaste-like tubes of Norwegian Kaviar. Then when she gets home, I can say “this smells mighty funky, you want to try some?”