Norway's Roads Are No Match for 59,000 Pounds of Flaming Goat Cheese
For the last six days the Brattli Tunnel in northern Norway has been closed. The culprit? A 27-ton truckload of a burning brown goat cheese called Brunost and the toxic gasses that emerge when you light the stuff on fire. "I didn’t know that brown cheese burns so well," Kjell Bjoern Vinje from Norwegian Public Roads Administration told Reuters. "Police officer Viggo Berg said the high concentration of fat and sugar in the cheese made it burn 'almost like petrol if it gets hot enough,'" reports the BBC, which adds that the "fire raged for five days and smoldering toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said."
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Petrol? Toxic gas? What exactly are Norwegians putting in their bellies? Well, according to About.com, this is what Brunost is, apparently:
A sweet, dense brown cheese produced either solely from goat's milk (as in Norway's "Ekte" brand), or from a combination of goat's milk and cow's milk. This rich cheese gets its distinctive caramel flavor, brown color, and fudge-like texture from a slow simmering process that gradually caramelizes the milk sugars.
Yum? Norwegians seem to like it. And it looks like solid peanut butter (there are no pictures of the fire yet):
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"Mr Berg said that no one was injured in the fire, only one other vehicle was in the area at the time and that the accident had luckily happened close to one of the tunnel's exits," reports Reuters. The tunnel will be closed for at least a week.
