Want To Experiment With Cheese? Experts Say Pair It With A Cookie

Cheese and crackers tend to be mainstays when you're filling your charcuterie board, and for good reason: The cheese provides a sharp taste and the crackers add a crunch. However, a couple of experts from Murray's Cheese suggest that a less common combination — cheese and cookies — actually pairs together very well.

Why cookies? According to John Montez, Assistant Manager of Education at Murray's Cheese, both flavor profiles and textures come into play here. Montez explains, "There is nothing unusual about cheese and cookie pairings. Cheese, being typically high in fat and salty, is a natural choice for cookies that are sweet and crispy."

Kathleen Serino, National Training and Curriculum Manager at Murray's Cheese, echoes the sentiment. According to Serino, "We have been pairing biscuits and cookies with cheese for a long time, because we see the cookie as an approachable 'carriage' for cheese that can help open the door to experimentation, trying new cheeses, or revisiting a cheese style that perhaps you thought you did not love before, but now you do when you have a little bit of sweetness alongside it."

When it comes to pairing cheese with anything, it helps to go with something either extremely similar or its exact opposite. Smooth cheese can go with smooth or crunchy foods, and bitter cheeses can go with bitter or sweet foods, for example. Cookies, whether they're bakery-style chocolate chip cookies or Girl Scout cookies, tend to be sweet. Sweet flavor profiles mostly come from sugar, which means you're unlikely to find a naturally sweet cheese (there are a few mildly sweet exceptions, such as Swiss cheese). Instead, the most common flavor in cheese is a salty profile.

This makes cookies perfect as an opposite pairing. According to John Montez, "When you have something sweet and crunchy as your pairing item, it opens the door to a lot of great cheeses. Sweet is not a taste that is native to cheese. Therefore, it complements the flavor of just about any cheese. Sweets will also make a good pairing for cheeses that might be too intense on their own. Cheeses with a lot of acid or funky and pungent flavors can be tamed with a little bit of sweetness."

There are lots of ways to mix cheese and cookies together. You can simply smear the cheese over the cookie like you normally would with a charcuterie board cracker. You could make a small cookie sandwich like an Oreo (although an Oreo cookie's "creme" filling is mostly more sugar and vegetable oil, not actual cream). Or you can get more creative. Kathleen Serino explains, "I have seen a lot of fun interpretations with cheese pairings that experiment with presentation, and find fun ways to deconstruct ingredients, like crushing up the cookies and using as a fun filler or topping, or melting the cheese to become an indulgent dip."

If you're more interested in baking cookies yourself than creating a store-bought spread, there are lots of combinations for baking cookies with cheese. For example, you could make sugar cookies with shredded cheddar, or thumbprint cookies with jam and blue cheese, or even simple cookies with a cream cheese filling. If there's a certain kind of cheese you've avoided in the past, pairing it with a sweet cookie, which eases its pungency or brings out its flavor, could be just what it needs.