Asda’s summer stilton might be the pinnacle of cheese-with-stuff-in wrongness. It’s white stilton with – can I remember this? can I ever forget it? – white chocolate, vanilla, orange peel, and peach. I needed to try it.
And while I was there, I noticed that Asda also sold something billed as the Ultimate Chocolate Cheese – Wensleydale with Belgian milk chocolate liberally scattered through it. So I sorta, umm, ended up buying that too.
The stilton looks pale, and is liberally scattered with chunks of dark orange fruit. It’s got a very soft, quite crumbly texture, reminding me slightly of putty. I taste some, and it’s incredibly, tooth-curlingly sweet. Despite the moussy insubstantial texture, it’s got a damp cloying mouthfeel that I find quite unpleasant. The lumps of orange rind are like a tiny Christmas pudding invasion – unseasonal and unwelcome – in my mouth. The pieces of peach are flabby, fibrous, and (again) sickly sweet. The white chocolate chunks are indistinguishable from the surrounding over-sweet mess. The obvious comparison to this is cheesecake, but it would be a disjointed, unpleasant, and over-busy concoction, and actually, I like my cheesecakes less sugary than this.
The Ultimate Chocolate Cheese was very similar in texture, crumbly and sticky and damp, and just as horribly sweet; I was getting accustomed to the sickly sugariness at this point. It was a disconcerting shade of pale brown, scattered with darker chocolate chunks. It tasted nothing like a Wensleydale, but rather a lot like the unpleasant chocolate yoghurt that used to appear in my school lunch box.
I’m an insufferable food snob who dislikes dried fruit, doesn’t approve of cheese-with-bits-in, and can’t abide over-sweet things. (Also, I consider white stilton a rubbish non-cheese – a sop to people too afeared of the tasty Penicillium roqueforti to sample the real thing.) I might not be best placed to appreciate the great things that these cheeses have to offer. But it wasn’t just me that recoiled in horror – FT’s own Pete tried the summer stilton, and shortly afterwards scoured the skin from his mouth and tongue with a particularly harsh century egg.