How to Buy, Store, and Eat Cheese
Buy Directly If You Can
About the Cheese Anthology
Cheese Anthology Index
Cheese Glossary
How to Buy
If you can, buy directly from a talented farm maker, an excellent cheesemaking dairy, an affineur, or a great shop with high turnover. Good signs in a shop are a strong but clean smell of cheese, order and cleanliness, a sense of caring, a ready offer of a taste, and cutting all but small cheeses to order. It’s okay if some high-volume items are precut and wrapped — ready-to-go — just hope they haven’t waited longer than a day or two.
Color tells something. Cheeses made from goat, sheep, and water-buffalo milk are white, while the interior of a cow’s-milk cheese is more or less yellow, and summer cheeses from cows on pasture are yellower still. All else being equal, summer cheeses are better, but all isn’t necessarily equal. More important than animals in green pastures are other aspects of milk quality, including freshness and cleanliness (not to be confused with sterility!), whether the fat globules are intact or have been damaged by pumping or trucking, and whether the milk has been sloshed around and exposed repeatedly to air. Beyond that, no cheese is better than the skill of the person who makes it. But milk from animals on pasture certainly helps launch an outstanding aged cheese into greatness.
Farm-made cheeses, coming from the milk of a single herd in a single location with its particular weather and plants, have the strongest association with place. The fresh milk and the close tie to nature, including its variability, open the way to superior cheese.
How to Put Together a Cheese Course
I like cheese in its classic spot before dessert; if there’s nothing sweet, cheese can be dessert. Fresh cheese works early in a menu, but at this late point, only more mature cheeses make sense. A cheese course can be composed of a single cheese, which for guests should be a little special or showy. It might be a generous slice of Gruyère d’Alpage, a dewy section of Cheshire, a creamy bark-bound Vacherin, a whole Banon in its leaves, a very creamy and odorous Époisses, a piece of fine Parmigiano-Reggiano, a tender goat’s-milk Robiola di Roccaverano, or a complicated dry southern Italian pecorino (maybe an aged, saffron-tinged, peppercorn-spotted Piacentinu Ennese). Or you might compare two versions of the same thing, such as a winter Comté with a summer one or a younger, creamier Sainte-Maure de Touraine with an older, drier one — or compare three ages. With four or five cheeses, the idea is variety. You could choose a small goat’s-milk cheese (maybe Pélardon), a tender cow’s-milk cheese (maybe Saint-Nectaire fermier), a firmer, older cow’s-milk cheese (maybe Fontina di alpeggio from Valle d’Aosta), an odorous washed-rind cheese (maybe Munster), and a blue (maybe Valdéon).
How to Store (if at All), Serve, and Eat
As soon as any cheese is cut, it starts to lose flavor through the exposed surface. Especially if you buy a slice, try to serve the cheese that same day. Serve small whole cheeses promptly, too, unless you have a cool, humid spot to keep them in.
In theory, I’m anti-refrigeration, probably because of the outsized influence of Patrick Rance, whose books I read when I was first learning about cheese. Cold inhibits the organisms that ripen cheese, some more than others, and it alters the result. Cool cellar temperatures would be better for most if not all cheeses, but shops tend to refrigerate, and if you live in a warm apartment the safest place for cheese may be the deep chill of your refrigerator. Very dry aged cheeses, such as grating cheeses, withstand refrigeration better, and Roquefort, to cite a different example, has been matured largely in an artificial temperature at or near freezing (rather than spending much time in the famous caves), so further refrigeration does it little harm and perhaps only good. Above all, avoid back-and-forth temperatures, which are hard on cheese.
If you have experience and feeling for the state of a cheese, you may be able to tell that the small, soft, surface-ripened cheese you just bought can be ripened further, for a few days or a week. But you need a place in that 10 to 16 degree C range. Put the unwrapped cheese on a plate. Spray water lightly over the inside of a glass bowl that’s somewhat larger than the cheese, and turn the bowl upside down over the cheese, terrarium style. After a few hours, through the glass you’ll see the condensation that should always be present. To ensure that, at least once a day add moisture to the underside of the bowl; at the same time you’ll release accumulating ammonia. Turn the cheese every other day. Assuming the surface flora are still lively, a fuzzy growth will reappear. Somewhat similarly, if you have a washed-rind cheese that you know has further potential, you can slide your wet hand over one surface, set the dry side down on a plate, and keep that cheese, too, under a bowl, maintaining the humidity, turning the cheese, and repeating the “washing” every day or two.
When it’s time to serve, remember that cold cheese has firmer texture and much less flavor. Even a relatively small piece of cheese can take several hours to warm enough to give full pleasure, somewhere around 10 to 16 degrees C (50 to 60 degrees F).
Fresh bread makes any cheese taste better, and in fall freshly harvested walnuts are an excellent complement to almost any cheese. Crisp crackers made with whole grains and seeds are good. I like to eat cheese with a knife and fork, which strikes my children as an incomprehensible relic of ancient manners, but it respects the texture, especially of soft, hand-ladled goat’s-milk cheeses.
I mention specific drinks in the entries for individual cheeses, but in general a simple, dry white wine goes better than any red, and a sweet white wine soothes a saltier, more intense cheese. Beer is an underappreciated complement; you match the strength (more or less the alcohol and the color) with the strength of the cheese. Good cold water is always safe. ●