Cheese tools: what earns its place and what does not

The knife in your kitchen is fine

Cheese does not require you to buy anything. Soft cheese does drag and tear on a blade, but dipping the knife in hot water and wiping it dry before each cut solves that neatly. Wipe between cuts and it gets better still. That single habit outperforms a drawer full of specialist knives. What matters more than the knife's shape is its edge — nothing cuts cleanly with a blunt blade. Sharpen what you own before buying anything new.

Two things that really do make a difference

First, a fine rasp grater of the microplane sort. It reduces hard cheese to something like snow, so the same weight of cheese spreads its flavour much further. Try it over pasta once and a box grater will never look the same. Second, a vegetable peeler: shaved into wide, thin ribbons over a salad, hard cheese becomes an entirely different texture. Neither is a cheese tool, both are cheap, and together they change how you eat cheese.

The cheeses these two change the most:

Holed blades and wires

The holes in some cheese knives exist to reduce the surface soft cheese can cling to, and the two-handled wire does the same job by another route. Wires are especially good at cutting soft cheese without crushing it, since a wire has no thickness and therefore no wedge action. If you buy bloomy rinds or blues often, one is worth having — but try the hot-water trick first. It is usually enough.

The ones that cling to a blade:

Very hard cheese is split, not sliced

Try to slice an extra-hard cheese thinly and you will get shards and a sore wrist. It is meant to be broken open with a short, stubby blade pushed into the grain. That is why the traditional parmigiano knife looks like an almond: the thin edge enters, the thick body acts as a wedge, and the cheese parts rather than being cut. To open a 40-kilogram (90 lb) wheel, two of these are driven in at opposite ends of the diameter and levered until it splits in half. The irregular chunks that result are the correct shape for this cheese, and the exposed grain makes it taste better too.

These get broken open, not cut:

One tool was invented for a single cheese

Switzerland has a cheese called Tête de Moine, eaten as thin ruffles shaved off the top of a standing wheel. In 1981 a man named Nicolas Crevoisier invented a device to do it easily: a spindle driven into the centre and a blade swept around it, curling the cheese up into rosettes. His eldest daughter named it, saying the shavings looked like chanterelle mushrooms — girolle in French. He ordered 300 for the first year and sold 15,000, and a cheese that had been fading away was rescued by a piece of hardware. Tools rarely rewrite a food's fortunes quite that directly.

Graters are not interchangeable

The coarse face of a box grater is what you want for melting — pizza, gratin — because coarse shreds melt evenly instead of clumping. A fine microplane is for cheese you scatter over finished food. A rotary grater is the one to put on the table for people to use themselves, and since fingers never approach the blade it is the safest choice with children around. You do not need all three. Cook a lot and take the box grater; mostly eat pasta and the microplane alone will do.

One for coarse shreds, one for fine:

Wooden boards beat marble

Marble photographs beautifully but stays cold, so the cheese takes forever to reach room temperature — you spend the whole evening keeping its aroma shut. A wooden board is more useful and probably already in your kitchen. Avoid the one you chop garlic and fish on, though; wood holds smells, so it is worth designating a board for cheese. Marble does have its moment: in high summer it keeps a soft cheese from collapsing across the table.

Spend on storage rather than knives

What most affects how cheese tastes is not how it is cut but how it has been kept. The money that buys a six-piece knife set buys a roll of waxed paper and a couple of lidded boxes instead, which will do far more for you. Proper two-ply cheese paper is better still — it lets moisture out slowly while preventing the cheese from drying — and it is neither hard to find nor expensive. Those three items keep cheese in good condition for far longer.

What you can skip

Six-knife sets, glass domes, dedicated marble slabs, thermometers, miniature ripening cabinets. Most of it occupies a cupboard. Knife sets in particular tend to end up with two blades in use and four in the drawer, so buy individually if at all. Glass domes look lovely but seal the cheese in, which it does not want, and unless you intend to ripen cheese yourself, a fridge drawer does everything a small cave would.

If you are working to a budget

For the price of a couple of coffees: a microplane, full stop. Pasta and salads change immediately. For roughly three times that, add waxed paper, a storage box and a vegetable peeler — for anyone who keeps cheese around rather than finishing it the same night, that combination returns the most. Beyond that, a wire cutter for soft cheese and a wooden serving board. Past that point it is preference. Money spent on cheese almost always beats money spent on cheese equipment.