I'd make a Greek salad rather than cooking the cheese.

If only it were so easy. It is unpleasant to eat straight, I'm sorry that wan't clear. That's the point of asking. Thoigh perhaps marinating it could help some. I could just toss it, but it's a goodly size, and I have a hard time throwing away food whose only flaw is lack of imagination.

What's the name of the cheese?

"Cheese". ... ;D

Mmm. No name on the packaging or in the store? How did you come by this nameless cheese?

a tiny bit in a spinach salad? or could it be part of a salad dressing? thinking of bleu cheese crumbles?

You might be able to dilute the impact in diluting foods that normally use feta, like chicken wraps, roast potatoes, or what you want to avoid, pasta (like the tiktok feta and cherry tomato pasta, using whole wheat pasta). Perhaps in a spinach pie or a fritatta, buried in a tortilla espanol, a vegetable tart like zuchinni or onion, or maybe diluited with a bland cheese like ricotta, yogurt and some garlic/herbs for a more palatable veggie dip.

Crumbled in a watermelon salad with mint and a squeeze of lime juice.

Could this be it?

3For a stronger, saltier feta, look for Greek-made feta, especially PDO-protected varieties made with sheep's and goat's milk, and buy it packed in brine. Higher salt content and aging in the brine intensify the flavor and improve the creamy texture. If you find it too salty, you can rinse the cheese or soak it in milk before use

It has a brand name somewhere. It is packagd for American sale! But it doesn't have a variety of cheese. It is sheep's milk, but I like sheep's milk feta and Roquefort. It's not exactly feta, just a cousin, and more like it than other cheeses. Sherry's description does apply, however.

“…or maybe diluited with a bland cheese like ricotta, yogurt…”

Kind of what I was thinking…mixing and ”diluting“ with milder cheeses could help.

input your description in chatgpt and like Sherry, they’re leaning towards a barrel aged feta. what country is it inported from?

I appreciate your attempt at creativity, but personally I don’t chase bad ingredients with good.

LOL! FOAS, you make a great point. It's from Bulgaria, but unlike the usual (I often get Bulgarian feta). I'm not sure it's a "bad" ingredient, though. just perplexing. Unlike Sherry's description, it's not creamy at all. Very firm and crumbly. It seems there's a consensus on diluting, which is something I hadn't thought of at all. Thanks, everybody! I think I have some provolone, and cream cheese, and I do have milk and cream.

I could make a cheese sauce. Right now, I have a block of chuck slow cooking with rough cut mirepoix, hot peppers, and a lot of Italian parsley. I could make roll ups or a casserole of that and a cheese sauce. Or, I have the end of a bread loaf that's very dry. I was gong to make bread crumbs but I could maybe combine with the cheese. Or if I lean towards the cream cheese, and a strong white wine, like chardonnay, and pepper, I could maybe make a nice croquette that would freeze well for the holidays. Maybe put a dried cherry in the middle and some pecans. That sound good to y'all?

I do a side dish which is thin strips or disks of zucchini brushed with a little olive oil then coked on a hot plate. The cooked zucchini is then tossed with some crumbled feta. Your cheese might work in this.

I recently made this feta spread with cream cheese, garlic, oregano & olive oil :

Feta Cheese Ball

Ingredients:

2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

4 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 green onions, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced
2 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano

freshly cracked black pepper to taste

Directions:

yield: 30 SERVINGS

prep time: 15 MINUTES

1. In a large bowl using an electric hand mixer, combine cream cheese, feta cheese, olive oil, green onions, garlic, oregano and pepper.

2. Cover and chill for 2 hours.
3. Remove mixture from refrigerator and form into 1 or 2 balls. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to serve. 4. Serve with crackers, flatbread, olives, etc.
Source: My Baking Addiction adapted from allrecipes.com

This delicious recipe brought to you by MY BAKING ADDICTION http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/cheese-ball-recipe/ 

I made 1/2 the recipe, and it still made a lot - it's good - a little like Boursin. I just packed it into a deep bowl, no molding.

I’m with FOAS.

No doubt you could use it in small or tiny or nano quantities to add bite or funk or pucker or whatever redeeming quality it has to some dish . . . but why bother.

In general, I don’t usually cook with stuff that I find unpleasant to eat on its own.

LOL! You forget that I'm a super taster. I'd miss out on a lot of good nutrition if I forewent all the foods I found disgusting on their own. And the cheese isn't disgusting on its own. Just not happy-making the way the other 20+ cheeses I have are. Mildly unpleasant. Nowhere near the spit-that-out intolerability of many other foods in their uncooked forms.

Ottolenghi does really naughty chips - fries for you - just before they're ready, finely slice a couple of garlic cloves and fry them in olive oil until golden. toss the oil onto the drained chips and sprinkle with some of your mystery cheese. It might be enough, as it's a side dish, to make it palatable.

Gooster, I think you've got it! More telling than the dishes (though your linked page is very intriguing--a lot of the dishes are similar, but just different enough to be new, to the slightly farther East food I grew up with), looking up "sirene" showed a true discription of what I have, plus things like a list of what it's called in various countries, which is "Bulgarian cheese" or "white cheese", and my box says "Bulgarian cheese" on it (though "white cheese" means something more like fresh hoop cheese to me, somewhere between ricotta and mozz). Thank-you for solving the mystery!

I always forget to take food pictures but I don't know if it would have been informative in 2-D anyway. For first meal, I decided on a chicken sausage and white cheddar with mustard on this week's bread (tomato, wax pepper, parsley). Perfect opportunity to do a melting test! I cut the sausage crosswise to make a gap in the middle of the bread, and positioned the cheddar on either side as well, with about a 1/2" cube of the sirene cheese in the center. Heated until the sausage was expanded and the cheddar just about to flop and go drippy, but not quite. The sirene softened and sank some, and maybe spread a little, but it didn't actually melt, nor did it meld at all with the cheddar. It was like the girl who agrees to go to the prom but won't let her date touch her while they;re slow dancing. So I cut the middle to taste it and the heat improved it--not nearly so bitter--but it's still way too salty, as in overwhelmingly salty in the vicinity of the sausage and cheddar which ordinarily one would call salty.

Lessons: Must be rinsed well or incorporated into equal volume of ingredients which have no salt. Should be able to be melted into sauce but might remain grainy. Could work well in a croquette or similar, where having a little integrity and not going all slurpy could help, though will need to be diluted with some other cheese. IThere is a good flavor in there It's just trying to find a way out. One of the dishes on Gooster's link might also be the ticket. One is along the lines of a shakshuka, while being totally different. :) I have some heirloom tomatoes...

It seems like many of the traditional dishes treat it like ricotta salata (grated on a horitiki adjacent salad) or blended with eggs, yogurt, tomatoes and/or potatoes when the salt needs to be diluted. I noticed even the cheese pie cuts the cheese with yogurt and eggs, and uses leavening to lighten up the filling. It has become interesting to me to see how some types of foods/cuisines vary from adjacent region to region, based on tradition and adoption of outside influences

So, y'all were so right about the dilution. I put the project aside because I was overbusy and knew it would keep. So, I got out all the stuff to make the croquettes, though my bread crumb idea tanked (mold). I have Ritz crackers in the freezer, and they would make a good coating--not elegant but everybody loves Ritz crackers and getting the focaccia dry enough would be a big bother. But luckily... But luckily, I hadn't done that yet. As I was getting the ingredients out, and looking for where I'd moved the plates of my crank FP because I wanted to try it on the nuts, my eye, as I was getting the cheese out of the fridge, fell on a sealed ball of fresh mozzarella that was trying to ferment. I had been planning white cheddar. I already bought a replacement block. But that mozz winked at me! So I dumped it in a mixing bowl. It hadn't gone funky, just a bit bitter.

And then the world collapsed! Well, no earthquake or anything. The lid was really tight and as I was prying it off, it gave way suddenly and with such force that half the brine went all over the floor. With not a minion in sight! I went through with putting the cheese in the bowl and breaking it up and mixing it with the mozz (after cursing the floor and spot cleaning it). The result was surprising! No bitter. No oversalty. Not too sweet. Very very fluffy. A texture like ricotta. And it made me think maybe it should be used that way, maybe in a casserole. It's definitely not the planned croquette. But I was kind of over the whole thing and put it in a container back in the fridge. It can become something tomorrow, though I'm supposed to be making tacos.

SHORT VERSION: The sirene cheese mixed with some aged fresh ricotta is excellent.

Ah....so diluted it's edible. :0) I was thinking Alfredo sauce when I saw it was pungent. I like MY Alfredo a little too salty...

It's still that salty! The other was an illusion of my kitchen, which this time of year is 80°+F. Chilled, all the salt, funk and lumpiness is back. It's like the sirene ate the mozz and took a nap...

Earlier today, before the salty sample, I'd been thinking stuffed pasta or empanadas, but I can't count on the temperature to be optimally nice. I did a ittle taste test, and a pinch is good around the dried cherry, and rolled in coarse pecan dust, like I was thinking for croquettes, but I can't count on it being stable to serve, and it would be plump cherry size, rather than croquette. So I'm going to punt. For instance, it should be okay on the tacos tonight, though I'd planned on smoked jack. Maybe okay n a sandwich. Maybe fried on an egg.