Snack
If 'Moon Cheese' Is the Future, Take Me There Now
This snack is 100% cheese—and also totally shelf-stable. But how? We tried all three flavors: cheddar, Gouda, and pepper Jack.
“I’ll have to check with grocery if it’s still in stock,” the Whole Foods customer care representative told me over the phone. “That’s a hot item.”
We were chatting about Moon Cheese, which I first tried a couple months ago, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
Moon Cheese’s manufacturing company Nutradried describes it as the “100% cheese snack that crunches.” Which is a catchy way of saying: It’s cheese that doesn’t go bad, even if you toss it in your desk drawer, then forget about it for months. The packages I bought today (Gouda, cheddar, and pepper Jack) are “best by 3/28/20.”
Admittedly, cheese that doesn’t go bad sounds strange. If I said lettuce that doesn’t go bad or bread that doesn’t go bad at room temperature, you’d be suspicious.
But, like freeze-dried fruit, it’s as simple as dehydration: “Using patented technologies,” the website writes, “we remove only the moisture from cheese while keeping all the nutrition and flavour.”
The result is a crunchy nugget, crouton-like in texture with an intensely cheesy flavor. I never loved Cheez-Its as much as everyone else—and now I realize, it’s because I always wished they were like this. All cheese, no it.
“Moon Cheese proved me very wrong,” my coworker Ella Quittner admitted. “It's excellent—like a cross between cheese and breadcrumbs. I want to crumble it up and put it on salads, on top of tomato soup, or eat it plain.”
Our executive editor declared it “pretty delicious,” then added, “I could definitely see myself eating these on soup or in salad, or mixing them into a fun snack mix—like a Chex Mix situation? That would be good.”
Here are four recipes I can’t wait to cheese-ify:
Written by: Emma Laperruque
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