Rinds & Leftovers

The last page of the wing, and the one about the parts of the cheese the other seven have been quietly assuming you threw away.

There is a nice symmetry here. A rind is the last thing the maker builds — see rind treatment for the five ways of doing it — and the first thing the eater decides about. Getting that decision right is worth a surprising amount of cheese.

Which rinds you can eat

The rule is short: if it grew there, eat it. If somebody put it on, don’t.

Edible — these are the cheese:

Bloomy rinds — brie, camembert, the whole bloomy family. The white coat is Penicillium camemberti and it is doing the ripening from the outside in. Eating a camembert without its rind is eating the least finished part of it.
Washed rinds — Époisses, Munster, Taleggio, Limburger. The orange coat is B. linens and friends, and it is where essentially all the character lives. See washed rind.
Natural rinds — the dry, grey-brown, sometimes slightly furry crust on a tomme, a clothbound cheddar’s interior surface, an aged goat. Formed by the cheese drying and whatever settled on it.

Not edible — these are packaging:

Wax. Gouda’s red, a waxed cheddar’s black or yellow. It is there to seal the cheese during ageing and transport. Peel it.
Cloth bandages. Traditional clothbound cheddar and Stilton. Remove.
Plastic coatings, which look like wax and are.
Bark bands — Vacherin Mont d’Or’s spruce, Harbison’s. The band is a vessel, not a rind, and it is doing real flavour work while it is on there. It is still bark.

⚠ The practical test when you genuinely cannot tell: bright, uniform colour and a slightly rubbery feel means somebody applied it. Natural rinds are irregular, matte and the colour of the room they sat in.

🔴 “The rind is where the flavour is” — half right, and the half matters

You will hear this said as though it settles the question. It does not.

What is true: a cheese ripens from the outside in, so the paste nearest the rind has been ripening longest and hardest, and on a bloomy or washed rind the surface flora is the ripening agent. The rind region genuinely is the most developed part of the cheese. That is why cutting is about sharing rind-edge and centre fairly.

What does not follow: that the rind is therefore the best part, or that refusing it is philistinism. It is the strongest part, which is a different claim. On a well-run washed rind it is also the part carrying the ammonia if the cheese is a fortnight past its moment. Somebody who eats the paste and leaves the rind on an Époisses is not making an error; they are making a choice about intensity.

And on an aged hard cheese the question is moot — a two-year Parmigiano’s rind has dried and hardened for two years and you cannot chew it. Which is exactly why it has its own use.

The Parmesan rind, which is the best-known trick in cheese and deserves it

Drop a hard-cheese rind into a soup, a stock, a bean pot, a bolognese, a risotto. Let it simmer. Fish it out before serving.

It works for a very specific reason: the rind is the cheese’s most concentrated protein, dried down over years, and long moist heat slowly releases the glutamates that make aged cheese taste savoury. You are not adding cheesiness. You are adding depth of a kind that is hard to buy any other way.

Practical notes:

Keep a bag of them in the freezer. They keep effectively forever and there is no reason to use one the week you finish the wheel.
They soften but do not dissolve. Take them out; nobody enjoys finding one.
Rinse a dusty one. The outside of a hard rind has been in a shop.
⚠ Only the natural ones. A rind that had wax on it is not a stock ingredient.

The stamped markings on a Parmigiano Reggiano rind — the pin-dot name, the DOP, the dairy number, described on protected names — are branded into the rind itself and are part of it. The casein plate is a separate small label and comes off.

The ends of everything: fromage fort

The French have the honest answer to a board’s aftermath, and it is a recipe rather than a virtue. Fromage fort — “strong cheese” — is what you make from the scraps: the last of four or five cheeses, whatever they are, blitzed together with a little white wine, a clove of garlic and pepper into a spreadable paste, then kept in a crock in the fridge and eaten on toast.

⭐ The reason it is good rather than merely thrifty is that mixing cheeses is a flavour advantage and a texture disaster, and this preparation only wants the first. You are not asking five cheeses of five different ages and moisture levels to melt together smoothly — a real problem, and the reason mixed-cheese sauces so often break. You are asking them to taste of everything at once, cold. It sidesteps the entire argument of this wing.

Leftovers that will not make a board again

Grate and freeze the hard ends. Freezing costs texture and keeps flavour, which is irrelevant once it is going in a sauce, and grated freezes loose so you can take a handful.
For a mixed-cheese sauce, use citrate rather than a roux. Five cheeses have five different melt behaviours and a roux has to accommodate all of them; sodium citrate removes the calcium cross-links from all five and the differences stop mattering. This is the one place I would reach for it before anything else.
A dry, cracked hard end still has a job — the stock pot, as above, even if it never had a proper rind.
A bloomy that has gone too far is the one thing on this page I would throw out. Over-ripe ammonia does not cook off; it concentrates.

⭐ And a note about my own cheeses, which is slightly awkward

Almost everything above is about eating rinds — and I wax most of what I make. I bought the wax and the brush from New England Cheesemaking Supply with everything else, back at the start, and a waxed wheel by definition has a rind you throw away.

That is a real trade and I made it without thinking about it for years. Wax is a seal, not a rind — the batch-15 note on the smoked and flavoured makes puts it exactly that way. It protects the cheese, it is forgiving, it is what a beginner should use, and it gives up the entire category of surface-ripened flavour that the washed and bloomy families are built on. A natural rind is more work, more risk, and more cheese.

Now that I have a cave with three concrete walls rather than only a converted fridge, the calculation has changed, and this section has talked me into it.

Sources

Rind edibility by type (natural, bloomy and washed rinds edible; wax, cloth bandages and applied coatings not) — consistent across cheese-industry guidance; mechanism per /cheese/science/rinds-and-molds/.
Rind markings on Parmigiano Reggiano as described on /cheese/law/protected-names/.
Fromage fort as a traditional French use for cheese ends.