If you spend a decent amount of time shopping in Budapest's supermarkets - as opposed to its increasing number of gourmet and specialty food shops - you will quickly come to the conclusion that these are not the places to buy cheese. In addition to selections that are generally limited to bland varieties of domestic sajt, you often have to deal with surly service. But I do know of one non-fancy place where both the cheese and the people selling it are tops - 85 kilometers down the M5 motorway, in Kecskemét.

While on a recent trip in the area, I decided to check out Kecskemét's public food market. By the time we arrived at around 2:00 p.m. about half of the vendors had already packed up and left, or were in the process of doing so. Luckily, the cheese nénis (aunties) were still open, and lured us in by waving chunks of cheese for us to sample. While you can find excellent házisajt (home-made cheese) at some of Budapest's markets - mostly the very young and fresh varieties - I've never found any in Budapest quite like this cheese we found in Kecskemét. In addition to the buckets of fresh sheep's milk and cow's milk túró, and butter and sour cream, there were wheels of cow, sheep, and goat cheese, some spiked with herbs or peppers, some firm and slightly aged, and others smoked.

We picked up this nice selection (which we rushed home to devour) of sheep's cheese, goat cheese, and smoked cow cheese. Our favorite was the hunk of cow's milk cheese in the upper right corner studded with hot red peppers (top in photo), which the cheese lady gave to us on the house for some reason. While we didn't do any other sightseeing in Kecskemét on this trip, I'd go back for the cheese alone, which was among the very best I've had in Hungary.

On another note, one other noticeable difference between Keckemét's market and those in Budapest is in the area of vendor honesty. The guy I bought corn from in Kecskemét sorted through his box, peeled back the husks, poked a little, and selected the best pieces for me. But in Budapest? As they say in America, tough cheese.