One cheese, one plate: ten simple things to make

A whole baked bloomy-rind cheese

Put a whole brie or camembert in the oven or air fryer at 180°C (350°F) for 15 to 20 minutes and the inside goes completely molten. That timing is for a 250-gram (9 oz) wheel; give a larger one longer. Score a cross in the top rind first and it opens neatly instead of bursting. Pour over honey, scatter nuts, and dip baguette into it — the rind is the bowl, so there is no dish to wash. If it came in a wooden box, discard the wrapper and bake it in the box.

The ones you can bake whole:

Tomatoes and fresh cheese

Alternate ripe tomato and fresh cheese, then add olive oil and salt. That is the whole recipe. The richer the cheese, the sharper the tomato should be. With burrata, do not slice it — split it in the middle and let the inside spill out, which looks far better. One trick: salt the tomatoes first and leave them five minutes. They release a little juice, their flavour concentrates, and that juice becomes the dressing. Balsamic is welcome but genuinely not missed.

These make a plate with nothing but a tomato:

Ricotta on toast

Spread ricotta thickly on toast, then either honey and black pepper for the sweet version or olive oil and salt for the savoury one. The cheese is plain enough that the topping decides the direction entirely. It works for breakfast and for midnight. Drain the ricotta in a sieve for half an hour first if it is wet, or the toast goes soggy. Thin slices of whatever fruit is in season turn it into something worth photographing.

Two that sit well on toast:

Cheese pasta without cream

Pasta water carries dissolved starch, and that alone is enough to bind a sauce. Take the pan off the heat, add a splash of the water, then add grated cheese in stages while stirring. Order matters: dump it all in while the pan is hot and you get lumps. Grate as finely as you can and wait until the pan has cooled slightly. Pepper ground fresh from the mill is a different ingredient from the pre-ground sort. With blue cheese, start with far less than you think and build up.

These turn pasta water into sauce:

Salad under shaved cheese

Bitter leaves, hard cheese shaved into wide ribbons with a vegetable peeler, olive oil and lemon. Shaved and grated are not the same dish at all — the thinner the shaving, the more it melts on the tongue and spreads its salt gently. Rocket suits it best; baby leaves will do. Add toasted nuts and it becomes a meal. The cheese brings its own salt, so you will barely need any.

Good for shaving thin:

Cheese cooked in a dry pan

Halloumi needs no oil — it browns in its own fat. Cut it a centimetre (about half an inch) thick, colour both sides in a hot pan, and finish with a squeeze of lemon. Crisp outside, squeaky within, it is the cheese that most surprises people the first time. Eat it as it is, over a salad, or in a sandwich. It firms up again as it cools, so serve it the moment it leaves the pan.

The one you can dry-fry:

Baked feta pasta, one dish

The recipe that went around the world a few years ago, and it genuinely works. Fill an oven dish with cherry tomatoes, sit a whole block of feta in the middle, pour over plenty of olive oil, and bake at 200°C (400°F) for about half an hour. Crush it all together with a fork and it is a sauce. Stir through cooked pasta and you are finished. Between the salt of the feta and the sweetness of the tomatoes the seasoning is already done. A few cloves of garlic roasted alongside improve it further.

The block that goes in whole:

Potatoes under melted cheese

Boiled or roasted potatoes with melted cheese poured over is a full meal, and it is precisely how the Swiss eat raclette. Boil the potatoes in their skins, melt thick slices of a semi-hard cheese under a grill or in a pan, and tip it over. Serve with small pickles and pickled onions — without that acidity you will tire of it within four mouthfuls. If raclette cheese is hard to find, gouda or gruyère gets you most of the way.

These flow over a potato:

A cheese dessert in five minutes

Beat a little sugar into mascarpone, then layer it with biscuits soaked in strong coffee: you have something very close to tiramisu with no eggs and no oven. Simpler still, ricotta with honey and a dusting of cinnamon. Or mix cream cheese with lemon juice and sugar, spoon it onto a biscuit, and call it an unbaked cheesecake. None of the three needs more than three ingredients, and all three land well at the end of a meal.

Spoonable straight into dessert:

The gratin that uses up everything

Several small leftover pieces in the fridge? This is the best use for them. Grate the lot, whatever they are. Pour a little milk or cream over cooked pasta, potatoes or blanched vegetables, cover with the mixed cheese, and bake until browned. Mixing types feels like it should go wrong and does not — in a melted dish, several cheeses give more depth than one. The only caution is blue cheese, which should stay under a fifth of the total.

Good candidates for using up odds and ends:

Three habits that prevent most failures

First, take the pan off the heat before the cheese goes in. Added to something boiling, it will clump almost every time. Second, grate as finely as you can — the same weight melts more evenly and tastes of more. Third, salt at the end. Cheese arrives salted, and seasoning before it goes in produces something inedible more often than not. Those three alone halve the failure rate of home cheese cookery.