The Finnish Cheese That’s Baked Like Bread and Dunked in Coffee
At the Dane County Farmers Market around the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, you can find a lot of local cheese, as you can imagine. One of them is a bit of a delicious spectacle: Brunkow Cheese draws a crowd around a large vendor tent, where folks line up, toothpicks in hand, to skewer samples of an unusual Finnish variety of cheese: juustoleipa (pronounced YOO-sto-LAY-pah).
The cheese-stabbing masses huddled around the Brunkow Cheese tent at the Dane County Farmers Market. (Kevin Revolinski)
This firm, half-inch-thick slab has brown spots on it from baking. The vendors cut up their “Brun-Uusto” and its flavored varieties for samples, dump the cubes on a large griddle to fry, and move them to sample trays when they’ve browned enough. Cue the cheese-stabbing masses.