Moose Cheese is a Delicacy You’ll Probably Never See In Maine

I've eaten a lot of weird things.

I've worked a lot of fine dining back in the day as a chef, and have had the chance to try a lot of bizarre things. Some were delicious... like scrambled beef blood. I used to work for a butcher/sausage maker, and he told us about all the weird things he'd tried over the years, so we made him bring in blood for us to scramble.

It tasted kinda like liver. Very iron-y. But with enough garlic, salt, and pepper... it was tasty enough to try once. I'll skip seconds on that though. Veal brains were not nearly as tasty. 1/10... Would not recommend. Sadly, probably the most exotic milk I've ever tried is just goat's milk. Pretty lame...

Recently, someone showed a photo of some interesting cheese on Reddit.

It got my attention immediately, because it claimed to be "moose cheese". While I do know that deer have been pretty successfully domesticated, I'd never heard of moose being calm enough to get your hands around their teats, much less harvest enough to start making cheese out of it, but heck... I was happy to do a bit more research.

Is "Moose Cheese" some local colloquialism? What did I just buy
byu/Lawlcat inMaine

As it turned out as I got further into the comments on Reddit, this wasn't actually moose cheese some store was trying to sell. It was actually humorously mislabeled cheddar to elicit a chuckle out of would-be customers. It looked real enough to fool at least one person into asking, so I guess the joke worked.

But hold the phone... Moose Cheese is actually a real thing.

Just not here in Maine. In Sweden, milk is harvested from a very select group of moose, and it's an extremely laborious process. The moose can be very temperamental. All that extra labor is reflected in its price as well. This crazy moose milk cheese sells upwards of $300 a pound!

If you do see moose cheese being sold anywhere outside of Sweden, and it's not hundreds of dollars a pound, then you're being fooled. Or at least fooled around with. I have to admit though, I'm extremely curious. I'd try the real deal. You only live once, so you might as well find out what's awesome and what isn't.

Some of these are totally whacked out... But you should try new things.