It cost a lot of cheddar.
Don’t drizzle this on a Ritz cracker: A Spanish Cabrales blue cheese has broken the record for most expensive cheese ever after getting auctioned off for over $32,000 at a local cheese festival.
“We knew we had a good cheese but also that it is very difficult to win,” Guillermo Pendás, who manufactured the un-brie-lievably pricey nosh at the family factory in Los Puertos, told Spanish rag Efe, per The Times of London.
A single 4.8-pound wheel of the semi-hard, pungent dairy product — which is matured in the mountain caves of Asturias in Northern Spain — went under the hammer for €30,000 ($32,408.10), setting a new Guinness World Record.
This came after it got named the best cabrales of the year at Las Arenas’ 51st annual cheese competition, at which it’s auctioned off every year, Newsflash reports.
The umamilicious bread spread had been sold to Iván Suárez, the owner of the El Llagar de Colloto restaurant near Oviedo, who said the “passion for the land” and “work of the cheesemakers” inspired him to up the bid.
He also bought the previous Guinness World record-setting cheese, another Calabres which sold in 2019 for €20,500 ($22,129).
This cheese’s exorbitant price is due in part to the backbreaking process of making it.
First, the manufacturer takes raw cow’s milk or a mixture of cow’s, sheep’s and goat’s milk and then ages it for at least four months in mountain caves in the Cabrales region in the Picos de Europa national park.
Rosa Vada, Guillermo Pendás’ mother and the owner of Los Puertos, said the winning cheese had been matured in a 1,400-meter-high (4,593 feet) cave at 44.6 F for “a minimum of eight months.”
She said her particular cheese-maturing cavern is located in a town called “Póo [high place] de Cabrales,” which “is so small they don’t name the streets,” so it’s “best to ask” for directions.
After aging, the ritzy dairy product is transported an hour down the mountain by foot to the nearest road, whereupon it’s sold for around $30-$35 for a little over two pounds (the wholesale price of a premium steak).
In fact, this bank-breaking blue is often used to adorn giant slabs of beef like a fancypants Philly Cheesesteak.
No word as to whether anyone plans on using it to top the world’s most expensive burger, which sold for $5,964 in the Netherlands in 2021.
The wallet-sapping sandwich, nicknamed The Golden Boy, took nine hours to prepare and was a veritable meaty Mount Rushmore of top-shelf ingredients, including Japanese wagyu beef, beluga caviar, Alaskan king crab and white truffle.