Organization of meals
Like many Europeans, Norwegians eat 3-4 times a day. Breakfast is usually cold and with coffee. Lunch at work is also cold and often packed. Dinner is hot, it is eaten at home with the family. For breakfast, they often eat sandwiches with meat.
cheese and jam, corn flakes, as well as milk, fruit juice, coffee and tea. For lunch they eat fish, meat and bread. For lunch by 17:00, Norwegians eat potatoes, meat, fish and a lot of bread. Dinner at 7-8 pm, sometimes it is light and consists only of sandwiches.
What to try in Norway?
Norway is one of the European countries with developed dairy farming. The cheese varieties produced there are not as well known as the Italian or Dutch ones, however, there is something to try.
Brunust
Brunust is a cheese made from cow and goat milk. Cheese makers used soft brown cheese and sour cream added to it. This cheese now has several varieties. One of them is geytust, that is, a semi-solid brown made from goat’s milk.
This cheese has a sweet caramel flavor. In its preparation, whey is used instead of cream. From it you can get a sauce if mixed with juniper berries. Brunust is suitable as an appetizer for lutefisk, it is eaten with bread and lefse flatbread. If brunost is made exclusively from cow’s milk, then it is called fletemyust.
A variety of Brunust is also a cheese with a hard-to-remember name “Gudbrandsdalen”. This brown cheese was made in the Gudbrandsdal valley in the south of the country. For its preparation, cow whey, sour cream, cow and goat milk are used.
It goes well with marmalade, red fruits and wheat bread. In 1933 Anna Hov, a cheese maker, was awarded a royal medal for her invention, the year she turned 87.
Fletemyust is a brown cheese with a mild caramel flavor, a type of brunost. It is made from cream, whey and cow’s milk.
Ridder
Semi-hard cheese. It has no eyes and has a raw yellow color, spicy taste and moderately spicy. It is produced in orange wax. In the manufacture of Ridder, cheese makers use cow’s milk, bacteria, sour cream, salt, cow’s rennet, and food additives E251 and E160.
The appearance of this type of cheese in the country of the fjords dates back to the 1960s. At first it was produced by a small dairy plant in the western part of the country.
The name literally translates as “knight”, so it is similar to the German “ritter”. The Ridder brand itself is registered in Norway and the cheeses are exported to various European countries. Ridder is good with sandwiches or with fruit, it is easy to cut.
Snefrisk
The name of this variety of cheese has a poetic name and translates as “fresh as snow”. It contains goat’s and cow’s milk in a ratio of 80 to 20. Snefrisk appeared recently, in 1994, and belongs to young varieties of cheese.
It is produced by Tine, and it has two types – semi-solid goat and fresh cream with cow’s cream. The cheese is characterized by a bright and rich taste with a flexible texture. It is good with salty snacks or sandwiches. Using Snöfrisk cheese.
Gamalust
Another type of cheese is called Gamalust, which literally translates as “old cheese”. It is a semi-hard blue cheese, relatively spicy in taste. This cheese is one of the oldest dishes of Norwegian cuisine, as it has a long history, it was prepared back in the days of the Vikings.
The first mention of it in the sources dates back to 1774. For its preparation, rennet and salt are not used. When mature, it looks like a rough, hard and moist product, sometimes grainy, brownish-yellow or golden in color. It has a pleasant smell and has no crust.
Gamalust produces heads of 380 grams and heads of 1.6 kilos. The preparation of such cheese is a whole art, laborious and requires special equipment with noble mold spores. In other states, such cheese is not produced, so it can be considered a gastronomic rarity.
Since 1991, the main enterprise for the production of cheese has been the milk processing plant of the Tine cooperative in the commune of Vic. 200 tons of cheese are produced annually.
It is served on the table in thin slices, the cheese goes well with black bread and flat cakes, as well as with butter, honey, lingonberry jam, and port wine.
Jarlsberg has a spicy and sweet taste. The age of maturation can be up to 15 months. His crust is yellow wax. This cheese is exported and sometimes even comes across on the shelves of Russian stores. Although some of its species are produced in limited editions. It is suitable for cooking and for eating as a snack.
This variety is similar to Emmental and various smoky cheeses from Switzerland. Its roots also go to the Alpine Federation. Cheese makers from Switzerland came to the country of the fjords in the 1830s and began to teach Norwegians how to make cheese according to their recipe. In the 1960s, it began to be exported, Yarlsberg gained popularity in Europe and North America.
Lesser known varieties of cheese
Kraftkar cheese comes from the town of Thingvoll in western Norway. It is made from cow’s milk, cream and mold. The title literally translates to “Strong Man”. Its production began in 2004.
Primost cheese is made from cow’s milk and has a soft texture and a semi-sweet taste. Compared to other cheeses, it is similar to Brunust.
Soft sour milk cheese is called Pultost. It is flavored with cumin and can be either grainy or spreadable. The name translates as “porridge”. It goes well with toast, flatbread, boiled potatoes. Its place of production is Innlandet County, north of Oslo.
