Buying Cheese

This is the wing where I have the least authority and the most practice. I have made cheese for thirty years and I have bought it for longer than that, in far greater quantity, and — as I said on my thirty years — buying is not the poor relation here. Cheese is the one food I make where the shop version is often better than mine, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

So this page is about spending money well.

⭐ The one thing that matters most is not printed anywhere

Every label tells you how old the cheese is. None of them tells you how long ago it was cut, and after the wheel is opened that is the clock that governs everything.

An intact wheel is a sealed system. It has a rind, which is a working organ — see rinds and moulds — and a stable interior that has been changing slowly and on purpose for months or years. Cut it, and you expose a face of soft, wet, fatty protein to oxygen, to the air’s moulds, and to a refrigerator’s drying draught. Ripening does not politely continue; a different set of processes starts, and none of them is the one the maker intended.

So “aged 24 months” is a statement about the wheel, not about the wedge in your hand. A twenty-four-month Parmigiano cut this morning and a twenty-four-month Parmigiano cut five weeks ago are not the same product, and only one of them is worth what the sticker says.

This single fact reorganises all the ordinary advice. Buy where they cut to order. Buy small. Buy often. Everything below is downstream of it.

The counter versus the case

Cut to order is the thing worth paying for. Somebody takes a wheel, cuts your piece off it in front of you, and wraps it. The cut face is minutes old.

Pre-cut and re-wrapped, sitting in a chilled case in cling film, is the same cheese at an unknown and un-stated age. It may be fine. It may have been cut a fortnight ago, and the film has been doing it no favours the whole time.

Vacuum-packed deserves better than its reputation, and it splits by family. For a hard, low-moisture cheese — cheddar, Parmesan, an alpine — vacuum packing is genuinely good: it removes the oxygen, it holds the moisture in, and a hard cheese has no surface flora that needs to breathe. For a bloomy rind or a washed rind it is close to sabotage, because those rinds are alive and you have just sealed them in their own ammonia. A vacuum-packed brie is a brie somebody has stopped the clock on at whatever moment was convenient.

⚠ And a vacuum-packed wedge often “sweats” a little fat when you open it and smells briefly of nothing much. Let it sit uncovered for twenty minutes before you judge it. I have thrown away perfectly good cheese for this and I was wrong to.

🔴 The white stuff is usually not mould

The most common reason people reject a good cheese at the counter is a fine white bloom or crunchy white specks, read as mould or as some kind of failure.

On an aged hard cheese, crunchy white grit inside the paste is tyrosine — an amino acid crystallising out because proteolysis has run properly. A soft white film on the surface of a cheddar is almost certainly calcium lactate, which is cosmetic. Same word, entirely different reports on the cheese, and the ripening page has the mechanism.

⭐ Neither is a defect. The crunch in a good aged gouda is the cheese telling you it did the work.

Tasting at the counter

Ask. Any counter that cuts to order will give you a sliver, and if they will not, that tells you what kind of shop it is.

What I actually do with the sliver, in this order:

1. Smell it, then eat it. Ammonia in a bloomy rind means over-ripe. In a washed rind a certain barnyard reek is the point and is not the same smell — this is the one that takes practice.
2. Feel the paste against the roof of my mouth. Chalk in the centre of a camembert means not ready. Chalk in the centre of a Chaource means correct, because that one is a lactic set and the core is the design. That distinction is on the makes page and it is the single most useful thing I learned writing this section.
3. Wait. Aged cheese finishes late. Whatever it does after ten seconds is what you will be living with.

What is worth paying for, and what is not

I will be blunt, because this is where money goes astray.

Worth it: an intact-wheel cheese cut for you. A cheese whose name is doing legal work — a protected name is at minimum a promise about method, and often about milk, breed and place. A shop that turns over stock fast.

Not worth it, or at least not automatically: age, past a point. Marketing loves an age statement because it is a number, and a number sells. But an eighteen-month cheddar is not better than a twelve-month one, it is a different cheese — drier, sharper, crystallier, less able to melt. Buy the age that suits what you are doing with it, which for a sauce means a younger cheese than instinct suggests. Cooking with cheese has that argument in full.

⚠ And “artisan” is not a regulated word. Neither is “farmhouse”, “handmade” or “small batch”. Those carry no obligation whatsoever — unlike the terms on the labeling page, which do.

Buy small, buy often

The USDA’s advice for keeping mould off food opens with the least glamorous line in food safety and it happens to be correct: “Buying small amounts and using food quickly can help prevent mold growth.”

Which is the honest summary of this whole page. A modest piece of something excellent, bought this week and eaten this week, beats a large piece of something better that spends a month in the fridge getting worse. Cheese is not an investment. It is already as good as it is ever going to be on the day you buy it, and every day after that is subtraction.

That is the opposite of how I think about everything else I make — my aging fridge exists precisely because time adds — and the difference is that a cave is a controlled environment and a domestic refrigerator is not.

Sources

• USDA FSIS, Molds on Food: Are They Dangerous? — “Buying small amounts and using food quickly can help prevent mold growth.”
• Crystal identification (tyrosine in the paste, calcium lactate on the surface) as set out on /cheese/science/ripening/, which carries the underlying references.
• Terms of art with no regulatory definition (“artisan”, “farmhouse”) versus the defined terms on /cheese/law/labeling/.