Dave's Cheese Notes: Menonita
Back to Dave’s Cheese Pages.
There’s a selection of cheeses by Quesos Navarro at my grocery store.
They have a website:
The Navarro story is interesting and not what you’d expect:
Don Alberto Navarro Cruz and Doña Soledad González were pioneers in many ways. …they built the first ice factory in Tepatitlán… From that experience, they took their next step: buying milk, cooling it, and selling it to the dairy industry… Their collaboration with Kraft Foods opened a new door: cheese production.
Searching for menonita cheese brought me to the queso Chihuahua page on Wikipedia:
In Chihuahua and neighboring states, it is called queso menonita, after the Mennonite communities of Northern Mexico that first produced it, while elsewhere it is called queso Chihuahua.
Ha, cool, I was right about the Mennonite name connection. That had been my guess. The Mennonites are an Anabaptist Christian group named after priest Menno Simons (1496-1561) from the Netherlands.
I thought I had found a great cheese connection:
Menno Simons rejected the violence advocated by the Münster movement, believing it was not Scriptural.
Sadly, the German city of Münster (of the Münster rebellion Menno rejected) is not related to the Munster in north-eastern France after which the cheese is named. Oh well.
Anyway, let’s slice off some pieces and give it a try.
My initial reaction: "Cheddar. Mexican Cheddar."
In fact, continuing on with the Wikipedia entry:
Queso Chihuahua is good for melting and is similar to a mild white Cheddar or Monterey Jack.
Yup, absolutely.
I really don’t know if this this the finest example of queso Chihuahua/menonita or not. It’s very mild. It’s a perfectly adequate cheese, but it looks like you usually melt it on other foods rather than snack on chunks of it.