Eagle-eyed Chowhounders might just deserve a mention in our wills, especially when they clue us in to such once-in-a-blue-moon finds like Il Laboratorio del Gelato’s cheddar gelato. Apparently, Il Laboratorio brews up a big batch of the stuff every month or so for 24 Prince, a Modern American restaurant in Soho that serves it as part of an apple crisp/cheddar ice cream combo. But on the rare occasions when the gelateria decides to make a bit extra, they sell it in the shop. You just have to be ready to pounce when it’s there. And with a quick afternoon e-mail to HungryMan, who works Downtown, we pounced.

HungryMan hurried back to the NoshPad, calling me three times from the taxi to let me know the status of the tub– he couldn’t have been more diligent if he’d been carrying a transplantable kidney. You probably have already guessed that we grabbed a few spoonfuls before we stuck it into the freezer. Doing so made us realize that we needed to forage for something to serve it with, because on its own, it’s a little odd-tasting. Not bad, by any means, but also not the kind of thing you’d imagine eating while curled up in front of a movie.

Like most Il Laboratorio goodies, cheddar gelato finds the purest expression of its fundamental flavor and then announces it, like a oboe sounding a perfect A-440 to tune the rest of the orchestra. This gelato brings to mind every dish of macaroni and cheese, every Wisconsin or Orgeon cheese plate, and yes, every Cheez-It you’ve ever eaten. But at the same time, the sugar and the cream work to jar memories of mellow cheesecakes and cannoli. Cheddar gelato also seems a little lonely on its own.

So we found it a few companions, some better than others: the first was a pretty literal gloss on 24 Prince’s own dessert, an apple tart that we procured from the only place selling apple tarts in Hell’s Kitchen at this hour– the Bread Factory. Not normally our first choice, but it did the job. HungryMan enjoyed this pairing much more than I did, but both of us thought that the cheese flavor was muted and blunted by the pastry and the cloying goo on the fruit. I am sure that 24 Prince’s apple crisp is much finer than this, so I won’t speculate about it, but I will say that the Bread Factory tart was not an adequate substitute.

Next up was our low-tech dessert: simple slices of crisp Granny Smith apples enlisted as rudimentary scoops for the cheddar gelato. This was our resounding favorite: the apple’s tang distracted attention just enough from the cheese flavor, and at the same time it echoed back a bit of the cheddar’s sharp bite. I imagined scooping out the center of a halved green apple and filling it with the cheddar gelato as a way of turning this into a more table-ready presentation. But who needs the table? HungryMan and I polished off half the tub this way before we knew what we had done.

Our final dessert was also a winner. Here, we drizzled good quality sweet Spanish amontillado sherry over a tiny scoop of the cheddar gelato. The rationale here was that cheese and sherry are so good in tandem, as are ice cream and sherry. So by some transitive property of cooking calculus, that means that cheddar gelato and sherry should meld beautifully. And they did. What we would like to try is an amontillado sherry and Granny Smith combination that brings together both of these flavors with the cheddar gelato. But that will have to wait either for Il Laboratorio del Gelato to begin churning the stuff on a regular basis or for our next lucky break on the Lower East Side. If you feel inspired to try the cheddar gelato, give Il Laboratorio a call first to find out when it’s on their schedule, and if you do, don’t forget to drop us an e-mail to tell us about it.

Il Laboratorio del Gelato, 95 Orchard Street (just south of Delancey), 212-343-9922