It's been a while since my last cheese review, so let's make up for that, shall we?
This time I ordered a pound each of Asiago Pressato, green waxed Irish Cheddar, and Pecorino Calabrese
The first, Asiago Pressato, this was something I got Mom (my fellow taste tester) because she adores the softer cheeses. In fact, this cheese is a D.O.P.-protected cheese of Italian origin made with pasteurized cow's milk. It's a very, very young cheese, barely almost a month old, and very, very soft.
This is a super gentle, buttery-tasting cheese that very easily melts on the tongue and hardly resembles her harder and drier Italian cousins like Asiago D'Allevo. Mom considered it the kind of cheese she'd both snack on and use in cheese dishes, and I would have to agree. Its storage life isn't as long as most other Italian cheeses, so be sure to store it promptly and finish it within a week or two after opening.
The next cheese we tried could not have been more different. Irish Cheddar (which uses a green wax rind for preservative purposes) is a much harder and sharper cheese. It's quite acidic cow's milk cheese, which is reflected in a very sharp and tart cheese even by most cheddar standards. That said, the tartness of the taste is still quite pleasant if you want an adventurous snacking cheddar or a lively cheddar to complement a meal. It's a tad prone to being crumbly, so if you want to mix it with meals in that fashion it will grate easily.
The last cheese we tried, the Pecorino Calabrese, is a rather traditional hard Italian cheese. Made of sheep's milk and aged about 6 months, it's rather dry and hard, but still soft enough to chew comfortably. It's a decent snacking cheese, but mom was of the opinion is a better cooking cheese, and given its similar flavor profile to Parmigiano and Grana Padono, she has a point. That said, it has a rather nice flavor, but I'm rather biased toward hard Italian cheeses with a sharp bite, so take that as you will. It's not as salty as Parmigiano, so it's best to use it as a substitute if the intense salt of Parmigiano is not something you'd prefer to deal with.
