Toque Cheese and Bacon - Nasal Snuff Review
As always, this article has been written without the aid of artificial intelligence. If you would like to support what I do, consider picking up an accessory from the shop. They're really nifty!
Introduction
Toque Cheese and Bacon has been around for more than a decade at this point, and remains, from my understanding, one of Toque's best sellers. It's a bizarre concept for a tobacco product, and really any non-food item in general - Roderick Laurie, the owner of Toque, knows this very well, and in a video interview I did with him some years ago now he admits that he personally finds it disgusting, and can't really understand the praise that people give it. I wonder how he feels about it now, given it's perpetually talked about in snufftaking circles even to this day, and has firmly cemented itself as one of Toque's most distinguishing products.
Make no mistake that despite this being a very good snuff and being generally beloved and all that, it's absolutely a novelty product. I remember getting my hands on an Archie McPhee gag gift catalogue when I was younger, around 12, and ogling at all the weird stuff in it. They're still around, and while they sell the expected range of goofy garbage you'd want to see from a shop like theirs (whoopie cushions, rubber chickens, giant pencils, etcetera), they're more well known for their strangely flavored candies - pickle gum, thanksgiving dinner mints that claim to taste like a holiday spread, that type of thing. There's a whole shitload of bacon stuff, really an embarrassing amount given the year we're in, with the whole le epic bacon craze mercifully very much behind us at this point. It's seriously uncool today, but I remember being driven fucking bananas by all of it 15 years ago as a chubby little kid, and an entrepreneurial soul like Roderick's would have naturally had it on his radar. It would be weird if Toque released Cheese and Bacon last year or something, but it makes much more sense as a product born out of that time.
Interestingly, there has been a single other cheese and bacon flavored tobacco product introduced to market - an artisan snus made by a Ukrainian company called Snus.Biz. Sadly but understandably, it doesn't seem like they're doing business at the moment. I hope that they resume one day. Until then, Toque stands alone.
Presentation
All Toque tins, regardless of size, are excellent: screw-top steel tins with a parchment foam seal at the top and a lip that goes all the way up to the lid. When I first started fooling around with snuff, I only ordered from Toque (they have a seriously good range of simple, attractive aromas which are enticing for beginners), and so I didn't recognize what a blessing this was. Now, having tried nearly everything on the market, I can honestly declare that Toque's tins are uniquely good in a sea of seriously awful, messy, or rust-prone packaging arrangements.
The branding is plain, and has this strange 90's racing design language that is difficult to hate, but also difficult to love. Sans-serif typefaces on a flat yellow field really do pop out at you in an industry where most branding decisions were finalized in the 1800's, but only in the same way a bumblebee corpse might pop out at you if you find it in a bowl of honey roasted peanuts.
The snuff itself is nearly perfect, construction wise, for an English style snuff. Toque has remarkable grind and consistency, and what you'll see when you're opening the tin is a flat, stemless, red-brown powder with just a touch of moisture. The grind is basically the same grain as bread flour, maybe just a tick coarser.
Tin Note
All Toque snuffs have a heavy amount of ammonia. My tin has been aired out for a bit just from use, which is good advice to anyone who doesn't immediately find Toque's snuff to be pleasant on the nose. Ammonia is a natural thing in snuff, an offgassed byproduct of the tobacco's reaction with the alkalizers in the recipe.
This may not shock you, but Toque Cheese and Bacon nasal snuff does not really smell very much like cheese or bacon; what it does smell like, though, is fantastic, and nuanced, and still very strange. The not-cheese is the first note, a smell somewhere between miso and almond skins, and it does give a strange impression of cheesiness while at the same time being placably uncheesy. The closest smell to be found in cheese to this is probably a mild blue cheese without so much of the heavy creaminess. If you sat with a wedge of gorgonzola and pried out all the veins and collected them into a pile and smelled that, you'd be pretty close to this. It absolutely smells fermented.
The not-bacon smell is predictably close behind, and manifests in the tin note as the stank of dirty wood ashes, but not in a bad way at all. When smelled along with the ammonia (an inevitability with Toque), the smell is something like an unaged or poorly aged cigar. Again, this isn't meant to be a disparaging comment, but the smell is so downright strange that one has to reach for some weird vocabulary in order to be precise about it.
There is a little tiny whisper of Toque's toasted tobacco base behind all that. It's something sort of bread crusty. The top scents really mask it, so it's really hard to write much.
Scent
In the nose, the scent really opens up into this fantastic, rich, and toasty smell of a mesquite wood fire, and the fermented note solidifies well into miso broth territory. It's very likely that this smell is built upon a fragrant toasted tobacco, but you can't really say which. The mesquite wood smell only intensifies if this snuff is used in hot weather. A great candidate for an all-day snuff, if you're looking for something smoky, rich, and medium in grind! (This is much rarer than it seems, I promise).
Strength
All Toque snuffs are strong, and their freshness makes them even stronger. I'm coming at this snuff with a very practiced nose by this point, but the punch and head rush on this can easily arrest the breath of a new snufftaker - which is exactly the sort of thing you'd want if you're getting off of cigarettes or vapes, which is one of Toque's declared MO's. For someone accustomed to snuff, expect a medium-high strength snuff that has remarkable potency even when the tin has been sitting around for a while. There's definitely enough nicotine in here to be an all-day snuff.
Conclusion
Despite it being really weird, Toque Cheese and Bacon earns its reputation as a freakily good little snuff fair and square, and perhaps to Toque's chagrin, is absolutely worthy of being one of its most recognizable products. It's such a good, intense, and uncommon smell built upon a tobacco base that doesn't really receive many snuffs with this sort of smoky richness, and it's cheap and available enough that there's no reason not to try it if you're ordering from one of Toque's websites.
Do I like it? Yes!
Do I recommend it? Yes!
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