I write Cheesedex. I buy the cheeses one at a time, read up on how each one is made and why it tastes the way it does, and write the card when the eating and the reading agree.
It became a guide one cheese at a time
There is a lot about a cheese you cannot settle before buying it. Whether the rind is meant to be eaten, what actually separates Brie from Camembert, how the thing should be kept once it is home — none of that resolves while you are standing at the counter. So I bought them one at a time, ate them, and read up on how each is made and what its name is protected to mean. A kilo of hard cheese turns out to take something like ten litres of milk, and Parmigiano closer to twelve or fourteen. Making cheese comes down to three jobs — setting the milk, draining the water, giving it time — and what gets chosen at each of those points is the whole distance between Brie and Parmigiano. I wrote the first of them in the summer of 2026, and doing that one cheese at a time is how this became a guide. It is also why nearly every card tells you how the wedge should give under your thumb and what the cut face should look like: how much water came out and how long it sat are both there in the texture.
So here's what's here
Every cheese gets a card: what it tastes like, how it feels, what to look for when you're buying, and how to keep it once it's home. The reads work the other way round — you find them by situation rather than by name. What to pour alongside, how to lay out a board for guests, whether the mould that just appeared means binning the lot. If you want to keep track of what you've tried there's My Cheese Log, and if you'd rather show off a plate, that's Cheese Time. It isn't a shop, and it isn't a complete encyclopedia of cheese either. What it is written for is being read by someone who can't yet name a single one.
Health and safety topics carry their sources
Whether it's safe in pregnancy, when a baby can start, how much lactose is left, how far past mould you need to cut — these are the ones where being wrong does real harm. Those articles list their sources at the end. Official guidance comes first, from bodies like the UK's NHS or the US Department of Agriculture, and academic papers fill the gaps. That goes double for anything with a number attached, like a distance or a temperature. The inch you're told to cut past mould on a hard cheese is the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service's figure, not mine. Those aren't places to go by feel.
This is not medical advice
I'm not a cheesemaker, not a nutritionist, not a sommelier. What's here is general information gathered from public sources, not clinical guidance. If you're pregnant, breastfeeding, lactose intolerant, allergic to milk, or working out what to feed an infant, follow your doctor or your national health service rather than this site. Allergies especially vary enormously from person to person, and nothing written here can stand in for that. That's the whole point of the source links: not to ask you to take my word for it, but to leave the route to the original open.
Knowing what it is makes it better eating
Bite into a well-aged cheese and you'll hit hard little grains. They aren't salt and they aren't spoilage — they're amino acids crystallised out at the end of a long, slow breaking-down of protein, and they only show up once a cheese has had real time in it. Know that, and the same crunch stops being a flaw and becomes proof of age. This guide is where one of those goes next to every cheese.