Trader Joe's Wisconsin Sharp Cheddar Cheese

Trader Joe's has discontinued three of my all-time favorite white cheddars: Canadian Extra Sharp, Mull of Kintyre Scottish, and Lite Sharp Celtic. This is extremely annoying, but there's not much I can do about it other than keep looking for a new favorite.

I think I've found it. Maybe not quite a favorite in the same way as the others, but at least a new default choice--one that's good enough that I'm not constantly reminded of its inferiority. This is a straightforward, high-quality, no-surprises, no-disappointment white cheddar. It doesn't make me crave more and more of it the way my former three favorites could, but I'm sufficiently content eating it.

This realization gave me a dilemma. You see, a year ago I had rated the seemingly very similar Wisconsin Extra Sharp as just so-so. How could I explain this discrepancy?

So I bought a block of each and tried them side by side. I concluded that my original rating of the Wisconsin Extra Sharp was unfair. Maybe I was in a bad mood that week, or maybe it suffered somewhat by comparison to a recent memory of one of my favorites, and I was overly dismissive as a result of that. But I now find it so close to the Wisconsin Sharp that I would never be able to distinguish them if not for simultaneous tasting. The Wisconsin Extra Sharp has just a tad more edge to it than the Wisconsin Sharp, and I have a slight preference for the latter. But if you put one of them in front of me with no label and without the other for comparison, I could do no more than randomly guess which it was.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It has become my mainstay cheddar. Now I need to try it side-by-side with my other second-tier choice, the New Zealand Grass-Fed Sharp. If I get around to that test, I'll append a note here about it.

I guess I'm still technically rating the Wisconsin Extra Sharp as a "no," because now I'll choose this one in preference to it--but it's very close, and if I ever go for this one and find that it's out of stock, I'll take its near relative instead and not feel cheated.