If the cheese counter has ever defeated you: what to buy first, how to keep it, and answers to the worries beginners actually have.
Start mild
The stronger a cheese smells, the more divisive it is. Make a blue or a pungent washed rind your very first cheese and you are likely to conclude that cheese simply is not for you. A good number of people who say they dislike cheese just met the loudest one first. Learning your way up from the mild end is far more enjoyable — and this is a question of sequence, not taste. A cheese you cannot face today may well be a favourite in three months.
The mild end looks like this:
What to put in the first basket
Concretely: one soft, one firm, and one for cooking. Fresh mozzarella still tastes of milk and needs only a tomato to become a plate of food. A young gouda is equally good sliced plain or in a sandwich. A wedge of parmigiano goes into pasta, salad and soup and lasts for months. Add a tub of cream cheese and breakfast is solved. Those four will carry you through the first month comfortably.
One soft, one firm, one for cooking:
The next step
Once mild cheese feels familiar, move to a bloomy rind. Half an hour out of the fridge turns it into a different food: what was firm and bland while cold goes soft in the middle and starts smelling of mushrooms. Eat the white rind as well. This is where the range of cheese suddenly widens. After that, long-aged hard cheeses, and then blue, is a sequence that rarely overwhelms anyone.
What is waiting on the next rung:
Smell and taste are different things
This is the most common early misreading. A cheese that smells strong does not necessarily taste strong. Washed-rind cheeses are famously pungent in the fridge and surprisingly gentle and nutty in the mouth. Meanwhile a well-behaved-looking aged cheddar can be far sharper than either. So do not judge by the nose — take even a sliver. If someone offers you a taste at the counter, take it. One piece beats ten sentences of description.
How much to buy
Several small pieces beat one big one. For two or three people sharing, 50 to 100 grams (2 to 3½ oz) of each is plenty. A large block that slowly dries out in the fridge is much less fun than a handful of small ones. Soft cheeses in particular get stronger with time, so buy them small and eat them promptly. Hard cheeses are the exception — they keep well, and a big wedge is usually cheaper per gram than pre-cut pieces.
Where to buy it
A big supermarket is the easiest starting point; brie, camembert, gouda and cheddar are stocked almost everywhere now. To widen the range, warehouse stores are good value — the pieces are large, so the price per gram drops sharply, and for something long-lived like parmigiano a big wedge is no burden. Online specialists offer the most choice, but think twice about summer delivery. Wherever you shop, get into the habit of reading the ageing time and origin on the back. A few months of that and you will be choosing far better cheese for the same money.
Milk upsets me — is cheese a problem?
This worry keeps a lot of people away, and usually it need not. Most of the lactose leaves with the whey during making and ageing removes most of the rest, so a long-aged hard cheese has effectively none left. If dairy is difficult for you, start at the well-aged end.
The long-aged ones are the safest bet here:
Let it breathe
Cheese is alive, and sealing it airtight makes it spoil faster. Rather than wrapping tightly in plastic film, wrap it in waxed or greaseproof paper and store it loosely covered. Film touching the surface makes that patch damp and leaves a plastic smell behind. The vegetable drawer, where the temperature is steadiest, is the best spot in most fridges. Keep pungent cheeses in their own sealed box so the rest of the fridge does not take on their aroma, and wipe the knife between cheeses so their moulds do not travel.
Take it out thirty minutes early
This single habit changes more than anything else. Cold fat stays set and the aromatic compounds cannot lift off it — which is how people spend real money on cheese and taste almost nothing. Take it out thirty to sixty minutes before you eat. Soft cheeses change the most.
There is mould on it
On a hard cheese, cut 2.5 centimetres (an inch) around and below the mould and the rest is fine — that is US Department of Agriculture guidance, and it works because there is too little moisture for mould to travel far. On soft cheese or pre-shredded cheese, throw the whole thing out.
Dry enough to cut past and carry on:
Can I eat the rind?
If the rind grew on the cheese, eat it; if it was wrapped around the cheese — wax, cloth — peel it off. With bloomy rinds in particular, do eat it. A stony parmigiano rind is not for chewing, but dropped into a soup it releases a startling amount of savour.
One eaten rind and all, one whose rind goes in the pot:
A plan for the first month
The fastest way to learn cheese is comparison. Buy two each week, and make one of them something you have already had. The familiar one becomes a reference line that throws the new one into relief. Write a sentence each time if you can — whether you liked it, whether it was salty, what you ate it with. After a couple of months you will know which direction you lean: nutty or fresh, yielding or crumbly. From then on the cheese counter stops being intimidating and starts being interesting.