Dutch Spicy Kaas

We haven't reviewed a Trader Joe's cheese here in a long time, but our most recent taste test was for the Dutch spicy kaas. We love Dutch cheese, so we were excited to try this one, especially since it said it was made with peppers, which sounded unique.

First thought was that the cheese was so pretty! It was speckled throughout with orange and green, which we thought was from the peppers. The flavor tasted a little bit spicy (only in parts and not really that much), but no real definitive flavor of bell peppers that we could find. Oddly, the ingredient list didn't list any peppers - just milk, salt (it was very salty), starter, rennet, "flavour," and coloring from beta carotene and spirulina. Are the peppers just part of the flavor catch-all? They weren't even the direct source of the coloring. Maybe it's just because we're cheese novices, but it was all very confusing.

This cheese was a combination of cow's milk and goat's milk cheese, but for a cheese containing goat milk, it was a lot harder than we thought it would be. The texture was kind of similar to a hard cheddar cheese. In the end, we thought it was fine, but nothing we'd go out of our way to try again. Especially since it was $15.99/lb (and only in big blocks, so ours was $9). Maybe our expectations were too high because the description was so intriguing. Glad we tried it, especially because it looked so interesting, but it was just okay.

M's rating: 7/10

A's rating: 6.5/10

Buy again? Probably not.