The Cheese Board (37 page)

Even at the grocery store, you can lift up a cheese and have a sniff. Find the smells that attract you. If you like mild cheese, search out a sweet, faintly fermented cheese aroma. If you like strong cheese, the smell should still attract you. If the cheese has a flat or bitter smell, or an odor of decay (which is called a “dead” smell), trust your senses—the cheese has probably been mishandled or is past its prime.

Touch can also help you choose a cheese. If it’s Brie, give it a little squeeze. Is it the texture you are longing for? Do you like young, firm Brie or gooey, ripe Brie? Open the Camembert box and feel the surface. A ripe Camembert or Brie should be plump, with an overall pliable, soft texture. It shouldn’t be dry or hard and wrinkled along the edges.

Find out how long the shop allows their cut pieces of cheese to stay on the shelf. If it’s more than a few days, purchase your cheese somewhere else.

After a while you will be able to tell a lot about whether cheese is at its peak or over-the-hill. So back to the question: How do you choose cheese? Let the cheese talk, and just listen.

Slicing with a cheese
plane.

Having the right tool for the job is as important for tasting and serving cheese as it is for hammering a nail. Our customers often wonder, “You know, cheese always tastes better here than at home. Why is that?” There are many factors involved—the
surrounding smells
and the marketplace environment are two—but one of the main reasons is that when a customer is considering a cheese to buy, we offer a wafer-thin sample sliced off with our trusty cheese plane. There are only two tools at our cheese counter: a sharp, long-bladed knife for making cheese cuts and a cheese plane for shaving samples for the customers. Both tools are inexpensive and readily obtainable, and will increase your tasting pleasure tenfold.

A cheese plane is designed to cut thin, uniform shavings from a piece of cheese, a firm cheese in particular. Whereas a cube or a hunk of cheese tends to have a gummy consistency, a thin slice (less than
¹
/
16
inch thick) melts on the tongue, opening up its flavors. A good cheese plane (that means one made in Norway or Holland) will help you appreciate the sometimes subtle, other times pronounced, flavor variations from one cheese to the next.

For softer cheeses like Reblochon, Brie, Camembert, Saint-Nectaire, or Oka, you can try using a cheese plane by turning the wedge onto one of its cut sides and delicately slicing it. If the cheese is ripe, ready, and runny, it is best to use a sharp, longer-bladed knife, taking care not to make the slices too thick.

Extremely runny cheeses can be kept in a container and spooned out or scooped out with a short, wide, flat-bladed knife. For very hard cheeses, such as Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano, Mimolette from France, or California dry Monterey Jack, you can use the cheese plane, pulling off a thin curl of the aged cheese. At the store, if we pull the cheese plane across the top of a Parmigiano-Reggiano and it curls into a perfect ribbon, then we know we have a great wheel. Parmigiano-Reggianos are traditionally broken into chunks with a chisel-like tool and a small mallet so that the sharp blade of a knife doesn’t damage the whey crystals so integral to this cheese’s character. When selling Parmigiano, however, we bow to our customers’ desire for a uniform block of cheese and lay the knife upon it.

For the bigger jobs of dividing large wheels or blocks of cheese, the Cheese Board has the advantage of one tool that most homes do not have: the
English wire cheese cutter, a platform made of stainless steel transected by heavy-gauge wire attached to a handle. A large piece or wheel of cheese is set on the platform and the wire is positioned and pulled to smoothly cut the cheese. We keep two English wire cutters near the cheese counters, one for the blues like English Stilton and French Roquefort, the other for English Cheshires, French goat logs, or any of the crumbly cheeses.

Dividing Gruyère with an English wire cheese cutter.

Many customers ask us, “What is the best way to store cheese?” Cheese Boarders have brought cheeses home and stored them in the refrigerator in various ways—waxed paper, cellophane, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, recycled
waxed cereal bags, a glass cheese box with a water well on the bottom—all of which keep the cheese in good shape. Though there may not be a clear set of rules for cheese storage, there are some general guidelines.

While cut cheese should not be overexposed to air, it does need to be able to breathe; cheese is a living food, and wrapping it in heavy plastic wound tightly around the cheese over and over will harm its texture and flavor. At the cheese counter, we wrap large pieces of cheese in plastic wrap for display; because we are constantly unwrapping and wrapping the cheeses as we give tastes and sell pieces to customers, the stored cheese has a chance to breathe. (If a cheese has been wrapped for a period of time, we trim it before giving a taste.) At home, using a loosely wrapped layer of paper surrounded by plastic wrap allows sufficient air to circulate around the cheese, as does heavy waxed paper, well folded to seal the edges. There are also products specifically designed for wrapping cheese, some with an outer paper layer and a cellophane liner, others made of cellophane perforated with tiny holes. If you have a good cheese shop in your area, request that your cheese be wrapped in one of these.

Regardless of the method you choose, it is important to keep the cheese freshly wrapped. Do not reuse the same plastic or paper wrap.

Some customers are interested in ripening cheese at home. Experimentation is the best method; many of the most successful experiments at the Cheese Board have been the result of mistakes or surprises. A particular wheel of
Baita Friuli (a hard Italian cheese) comes to mind. One spring we received a mediocre wheel, so when the next shipment arrived, we put that one in our
cave
(a cool, humid cupboard we use for aging cheeses) to ripen, or in this case, to be forgotten. One year later, someone brought it out to the cheese counter and cored it. (This is done with a corer, a long half tube inserted into the middle of the cheese, turned several times, and carefully drawn out so the taster can check the innermost part of the paste to see if it’s ready to consume;
see illustration
). We were treated to magnificently fruity, sharp Baita Friuli. It was gone after two days in the shop—good news travels quickly. We’ve also had our share of failures, such as the unwaxed young Gouda we took out of the Cryovac and put in the
cave
unwrapped. When we checked on the wheel after two weeks, there were big fissures and a lot of serious interior mold. Had we taken the time to wrap it in foil, we might have been more successful.

Ripening a cheese to perfection at home requires a controlled environment—usually moist, cool, and cavelike. The type of cheese you choose for further home ripening should be a whole cheese; it’s really not possible to ripen
a cut piece of cheese. One good cheese to try would be a Camembert, or another small, soft-ripened cheese, as this type of cheese is often sold when immature and firm. A small block of waxed Cheddar would be ideal to experiment with; simply remove the wax and replace it with foil, sealing it tightly. Two hard cheeses—
Petit Agour, a small round of sheep’s milk cheese from the French Pyrénées, and young
Tête de Moine, a small, round raw-milk
Swiss cheese—benefit from longer aging, as they develop a grainier texture and a fuller flavor. Keep the cheese in a cardboard box that is a little bigger than the cheese itself to allow moist air to settle around it.

If you are serious about ripening cheeses at home you should purchase a combination temperature-and-humidity gauge. Below is a guide to the conditions that certain styles of cheese need in order to ripen. Find an environment in your home that meets these conditions, such as the vegetable drawer in your refrigerator, or a basement (making sure that it is out of reach of animals). Try ripening a softer cheese, like Camembert, for 24 to 48 hours, or try a hard block of Cheddar wrapped in foil for a month or so, turning it from one side to another inside the cardboard box every few days. As with sourdough bread making, there is only so much you can read about aging cheese—the rest is trial and error.