Forget about the Masters’ Pimento Cheese. Make room for Heritage’s Palmetto Cheese.

Serious stuff, pimento cheese is.

It fills sandwiches garbed in green wrappers that sell, famously, for $1.50 each at the Masters.

Supplier and recipe changes during the past two decades have unnerved patrons there. As ESPN's Wright Thompson once wrote — in 2013, after he and others noticed variances in spice and mayonnaise levels, not to mention consistency — the "profound and controversial change" warranted an investigation. Which he performed.

I began one of my own — using "investigation" even more loosely than Thompson did back then — after seeing, a couple of days ago, a post on Facebook by Palmetto Cheese, "The Pimento Cheese with Soul," a brand with roots in Atlanta but founded in the Lowcountry, on Pawleys Island.

Did you know you can get a Palmetto Cheese sandwich in Sea Pines at Harbour Town Golf Links during the (RBC) Heritage (Presented by Boeing)?

You can, for $4, according to Brian Henry with Pawleys Island Specialty Foods. His crew sold around 1,500 last year and is planning on 1,700 this year, the 50th edition of the tournament and the third year Palmetto Cheese is spreading the love in Sea Pines.

Still, if my math's right, that means just over one percent of last year's 130,000 tournament attendees enjoyed one of these sandwiches.

One-percenter food! We can do better, folks.

I realize that some people might not like pimento cheese.

In a recent column for the Chicago Tribune, Teddy Greenstein asked longtime Masters media types and found some of them weren't fans of "the caviar of the South" (a phrase I've often heard applied to boiled peanuts and one rarely used, in my experience, by Southerners who eat them).

Greenstein himself acknowledged covering the tournament since 2009 and never trying one — until this year. "It's OK," he wrote.

It's better-than-OK but kudos, Mr. Greenstein, for taking a swing.

Now, it's your turn. If you're at the Heritage, try it — maybe you'll find your brand.

If you need further encouragement, consider the fervor of a friend of mine, who, a few years ago, when snacking his way through Midwest winters in the Buckeye State, had family and friends down South mail him Palmetto Cheese (and Cheerwine).

Now, the good stuff is available in 40 states, including Ohio, according to the company's website.

But you won't find a Palmetto Cheese sandwich at Augusta National.

Unless you sneak it in.

And that, I reckon, would be controversial — blasphemous, even.

Seriously so.

This story was originally published April 11, 2018 at 1:48 PM with the headline "Forget about the Masters’ Pimento Cheese. Make room for Heritage’s Palmetto Cheese.."