Emporium Selection Gourmet Snacking Cheeses

Cheese is one of my favorite snacking foods. It is filling, high in protein, and comes with several health benefits. In addition, because there are a number of different cheeses, they don’t lack for variety.

Aldi sells a few options for snacking cheeses. I could pick up the grocer’s vaunted string cheese, for example. Or I could pick up cheese blocks, or even cheese cubes or cheese curds. There’s a lot to choose from.

One possibility I noticed recently was a couple of kinds of cheese sticks under one of the supermarket’s more upscale house brands.

Emporium Selection Gourmet Snacking Cheeses are an Aldi Regular Buy, which means you can find them in stores every day. The cheeses come in a package of twelve 7.5-ounce individually wrapped sticks and currently cost $3.29 per bag. That comes out to about 28 cents per stick or about 30 cents per ounce.

One comment about the packaging — the individual wrappers can be fussy. They’re designed to be easy to peel along the edge. Some of them are, and some aren’t: in several instances, I had to grab scissors to get these open because the place to pull the wrapper open was missing or impossible to find. That’s not what you want in an individually wrapped product.

Beyond that, though, I can at least say that my wrappers were fully sealed.

At the time of this post, there were two versions available: gouda and habanero jack. We tried both.

Gouda

If you’ve had gouda before, you know it’s got a different taste than your standard cheddar or other common snacking cheeses. It’s smoother, with a mild flavor. It’s a good gourmet cheese, and this tasted about like other gouda cheeses I’ve had in the past.

Nutritionally, it’s your typical cheese. Despite being a wrapped convenience food, the ingredients list is relatively short. As with all other cheeses, it contains milk.

Gouda: nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

Habanero Jack

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this cheese. The package advertised a touch of heat, but I didn’t exactly know what that meant.

Turns out it means the heat is like a game of Russian roulette. Sometimes I take a bite and it’s just a mild pepper jack-like cheese, while other times it comes with a shot of medium heat. It depends.

The nutrition here is about what you would expect, including a relatively simple ingredients list. Like the gouda, it has milk.

Habanero jack: nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)

The Verdict:

Emporium Selection Snacking Cheeses are a quick and easy way to enjoy more off-the-path kinds of cheeses. The gouda is simple and mild while the habanero jack has bits of kick embedded in a smooth cheese. Both are good depending on your tastes and may be worth a try if you are a snacking cheese kind of person. I would personally buy these again.