# Types of Cheese, Sorted the Way a Cook Actually Needs Them

URL: https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/types-of-cheese
Category: Food Facts & Kitchen Tips
Published: 2026-08-14T22:13:23
Updated: 2026-08-14T22:13:23
Image: https://tastessence.com/_astro/types-of-cheese.D-wz2gwk_Z21a4uc.webp
Cheese sorts itself into about eight families, and every one of them is decided by three things: how much water is left in the curd, what happened to the outside of the wheel, and how long it sat before somebody cut into it. Learn those three levers and you stop memorizing names. You start knowing that a fresh cheese will not brown, that a washed rind will perfume your entire refrigerator, and that anything aged past a year is going to grate, not melt.

Those three levers do more work than the country on the label. A [French cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/types-of-french-cheese) can be a runny bloomy round or a hard mountain wheel, and the two behave nothing alike in a hot pan. Ask the counter for the age in months instead, which is the one number on the little sign that predicts anything. Below are the categories those levers produce, what each one does when heat or a knife hits it, and what to reach for when the recipe calls for something you do not have.

## What actually separates one type of cheese from another?

Moisture, rind treatment, and age. That is the whole framework, and it is the one cheesemakers themselves work from.

Start with moisture, because it drives everything downstream. Every cheese begins the same way: milk is acidified and usually set with rennet, the curd separates from the whey, and then the cheesemaker decides how much of that whey to drive out. Cut the curd into large soft pieces and leave it alone, and you get a high-moisture cheese that is ready to eat in days. Cut it into rice-sized grains, cook it, press it hard, and you have driven out enough water that the cheese can survive months or years without spoiling. Fresh mozzarella and a two-year gouda are the same raw material at opposite ends of one decision.

Water is also what makes a cheese perishable, so moisture predicts shelf life almost perfectly. Open a tub of ricotta and you have three to five days in the refrigerator before it turns, and you will smell it going sour before the date on the lid admits anything. A wrapped wedge of aged cheddar in that same refrigerator holds for weeks, and a spot of surface mold on it is a trimming job rather than a loss. Buy the wet ones for the week you actually plan to cook them, and the dry ones whenever they look good.

Then the rind. A cheese either has no rind at all (fresh), or grows one from a mold the cheesemaker sprayed on (bloomy), or gets rubbed with brine over and over so that bacteria colonize the surface (washed), or dries into a natural rind, sometimes helped along with wax or cloth and lard. The rind determines which direction the cheese ripens from and, more than any other factor, what it smells like when you open the wrapper.

Age finishes the job. Time lets enzymes break proteins into smaller pieces and fats into the compounds that give [aged cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/aged-cheese) its sharpness, its crumbly snap, and those crunchy white crystals people mistake for salt. Aging also keeps pulling out moisture, which is why the categories blur: today’s semi-soft cheese is next year’s firm cheese if you leave it long enough. How long is long enough is a whole conversation of its own, and the full guide to aged cheese gets into it if you are curious.

One more variable rides along with all three: the milk. Cow gives you mild and buttery. Goat brings a bright tang and a chalky-then-creamy texture. Sheep milk carries nearly twice the fat and protein of cow milk, which is why sheep cheeses like manchego and pecorino taste so rich and dense. Buffalo milk makes mozzarella that tastes like it has been salted twice.

### How to use this at the store

Pick up a wedge and press the cut face with your thumb. If it gives easily and your thumb comes away shiny, it is high-moisture and you should eat it this week. If it resists like a bar of soap, it is a melter. If it barely dents and you can see faint white specks in the paste, it is old, sharp, and better grated than sliced.

## What are fresh cheeses, and which ones earn a spot in the fridge?

Fresh cheeses are unaged and full of water, which makes them the mildest, the most perishable, and the ones you should buy in the smallest quantity you can. Ricotta, fresh mozzarella, cream cheese, chèvre, feta, cottage cheese, mascarpone, queso fresco, and paneer all live here.

These are made by acidifying milk and draining the curd, sometimes with rennet, sometimes with nothing but acid and heat. There is no rind, no mold, no cave. What you taste is milk, salt, and whatever tang the culture left behind.

The trade-off is time. Ricotta and fresh mozzarella are best within a few days of being made, and they will go sour and slimy well before the date on the tub if you have been slow about resealing them. Chèvre holds up a bit longer. Feta is the outlier, since it sits in brine and will keep for weeks as long as it stays submerged, and if the brine runs low you can top it with a light salt-water solution rather than letting the top dry out.

Fresh cheeses do not brown and they do not stretch. Heat a spoonful of ricotta and it loosens, weeps a little, and stays white. That is a feature for lasagna and stuffed shells, where you want tender white pockets of it between the layers. It is a problem if you were counting on a golden top.

A few things worth knowing before you cook with them:

-   Fresh mozzarella carries so much water that it will flood a pizza. Tear it, set it on paper towels for 20 to 30 minutes, then use it. Or use low-moisture mozzarella, which is a different animal entirely and belongs in the stretched-curd family below.
-   Ricotta from the grocery store is often wetter than what a recipe assumes. Drain it in a fine strainer for an hour if you are folding it into a filling that needs to hold its shape.
-   Paneer and queso fresco are the ones that hold their shape under direct heat. They soften and take on color at the edges but they will not turn into a puddle, which is exactly why they get griddled and cubed into curries and skillets.
-   Mascarpone and cream cheese trade at one to one by weight, but mascarpone runs richer and looser while cream cheese is tangier and holds an edge. Going from mascarpone to cream cheese in a tiramisu or a mousse costs you the silk and adds a sour note; beat in a tablespoon of heavy cream per 8 ounces to close the gap. The swap fails outright in a no-bake filling that has to set, where cream cheese firms up and mascarpone stays slack. Neufchâtel gets confused with cream cheese constantly, and the differences between neufchâtel and cream cheese matter more in cheesecake than on a bagel.

Substitution inside this family is generally forgiving because the flavors are all quiet. Chèvre for feta works in a salad at a one-to-one swap, though you lose the salt and the firm crumble and gain a lot more creaminess, so hold back on any other dairy in the dressing. It does not work in a baked dish where you wanted feta to stay in distinct cubes; chèvre will melt into the background. Whether feta or goat cheese is right for a given dish is its own tangle, and the full comparison of [feta vs goat cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/feta-cheese-vs-goat-cheese) sorts it out.

## What makes a cheese “bloomy-rind” or soft-ripened?

Bloomy-rind cheeses get sprayed or dusted with a white mold, usually _Penicillium candidum_, which grows into that soft felt-like coating and then eats its way inward. Brie, camembert, and the whole family of little buttons and logs sold as triple-crèmes work this way.

That outside-in ripening is the thing to understand, because it explains every bloomy-rind wedge you have ever been disappointed by. The mold on the surface breaks down proteins in the paste just underneath it, so the cheese goes soft and runny at the edge first and stays firm and chalky in the center. A young brie has a white core with a thin gooey ring around it. A properly ripe one is yielding all the way through. Push it too far and the whole thing slumps and starts to smell of ammonia, which is the mold having gone past its welcome.

Cut a wedge from a wheel and you have exposed the paste with no rind to protect it, so a cut brie ripens faster than an uncut one. Wrap the cut face and eat it within a few days.

Serve these at room temperature. Not “took it out five minutes ago” room temperature, but a solid 45 minutes to an hour on the counter. Cold brie tastes like waxy nothing; warm brie tastes of butter, cream, and mushroom. This is the single most common mistake I see people make with a cheese board, and it costs nothing to fix.

Bloomy rinds are edible. The rind is where a lot of the flavor concentrates, and the mold used is a domesticated one grown deliberately. Eat it or trim it as you please; both are safe. What you should skip is any patch of blue-green fuzz that is not supposed to be there, or a rind that has gone slick and brown.

Baking a whole small round is the easiest party trick in the category. Score the top, set it in a small dish so it cannot escape, bake at 350°F (175°C) until the center gives when you press it, usually somewhere in the 12 to 20 minute range depending on the size and how cold it started. Watch it rather than the clock. The rind holds the melted paste like a bowl, right up until it does not, so pull it while there is still a little structure left.

What these do not do is melt into a sauce. Too much fat, too little structure. Try to build a mac and cheese on brie and you get grease on top and rubber underneath.

## What’s going on with washed-rind (the stinky) cheeses?

Washed-rind cheeses are wiped repeatedly during aging with brine, and often with beer, wine, cider, or brandy. That damp salty surface is exactly what a particular family of bacteria wants, and as they take hold they turn the rind orange or pink or a sort of sticky terracotta and generate the smell. Taleggio, Muenster (the real Alsatian kind, not the pale sandwich slices), Époisses, Limburger, and Reblochon all come from this treatment.

Here is the useful part: the smell dramatically outruns the flavor. A cheese that clears a room from across the kitchen usually tastes of beef broth, roasted onion, and cream, savory and round rather than aggressive. If you have written these off on the basis of the wrapper, taste one with your eyes closed and see if you still object.

Store them wrapped, then wrapped again, then in a sealed container, and even then your butter is going to pick up some of it. Butter and eggs absorb odors like they were designed for the job. Keep a washed rind in a lidded glass dish on the bottom shelf, well away from the butter dish and the egg carton, and check the wrapper every few days, because a rind that has gone slick and wet will get worse fast in a sealed container.

These have a real use in cooking that most people miss. Taleggio melts beautifully, better than almost anything else in the funky category, and a few tablespoons stirred into a risotto or laid over roasted potatoes gives you a depth that no amount of extra cheddar will. Raclette and the alpine washed rinds were built for melting over potatoes and pickles.

The soft ones, Époisses in particular, are spoon cheeses. Serve at room temperature, cut the top off, and go in with a spoon and good bread. Do not attempt to slice them neatly; you will lose.

## What sets semi-soft cheeses apart at the deli counter?

Semi-soft is where the reliable melters live. Havarti, Monterey Jack, fontina, young gouda, Muenster in its American supermarket form, and edam sit in the middle of the moisture range: pliable, sliceable, mild, and forgiving. They will not crumble and they will not run.

What makes them melt so well is the combination of moderate moisture and a protein structure that has not yet been broken down by long aging. When you heat cheese, the fat softens first and the protein network relaxes and flows. In a young semi-soft cheese, that network is intact and stretchy but still loose enough to give way. In a very old cheese, the proteins have already been chopped up by enzymes, so there is no network left to flow; it just separates into oil and grit. This is the reason the sharpest cheddar in the case is the worst choice for a grilled cheese and the best choice on a cracker.

The workhorses and what each one is actually for:

-   Monterey Jack: the neutral melter. Nearly flavorless on its own, which is the point in queso, quesadillas, and anything where you want pull without a competing taste. Pepper jack is the same cheese with chiles.
-   Havarti: buttery, slightly tangy, melts fast and smooth. The best sandwich cheese in the case if you like a mild one, and it browns nicely under a broiler.
-   Fontina: the one worth paying up for. Italian fontina from the Val d’Aosta is nutty and a little funky and makes the best baked pasta topping I know. The Danish and Swedish versions labeled fontina are milder and cheaper and will do fine in a weeknight gratin.
-   Young gouda: sweet, elastic, and a great bridge cheese, mild enough for kids and interesting enough for a board.

Semi-softs substitute for one another almost freely at a one-to-one swap. Trading Havarti for Jack changes the flavor slightly and nothing else. Where the swap fails is going down in moisture: replace a semi-soft with an aged hard cheese in a melting application and you will get a broken, oily sauce.

One practical note. Buy these in a block and grate them yourself. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with cellulose or potato starch to keep the shreds separate, and that coating is the enemy of a smooth sauce. It is the difference between a queso that pours and one that seizes into strings. Ninety seconds with a box grater, and I say that as someone who owns every shortcut in the kitchen and defends most of them.

## How do firm and hard cheeses get that way?

By losing water, and then losing more. A firm or hard cheese starts with curds that were cut small, cooked, and pressed under real weight to drive out whey, and then it spends months or years in a controlled space slowly drying and changing.

Cheddar, gruyère, manchego, aged gouda, comté, pecorino, and Parmigiano-Reggiano all sit somewhere on this spectrum. The differences among them come down to how the curd was handled, what milk went in, and how long the wheel sat.

Cheddar gets a step nothing else here gets, called cheddaring, where slabs of curd are stacked and turned to press out more whey and build acidity before milling and salting. That is where the tight, close texture comes from, and you can feel it in the wedge: press the cut face and a real cheddar barely moves, then splits along a clean line when the knife goes in. Alpine cheeses like gruyère and comté go a different route, cow milk in wheels you could not lift on your own, cooked hotter in the vat, which is why they taste of browned butter and hazelnut and slide into a fondue without splitting on you. If I can keep only one hard cheese in the drawer, it is a chunk of comté, because it grates, it slices, and it rescues a plain omelet on a Tuesday. Manchego is sheep milk from La Mancha, and that zigzag on the rind is the print of the woven molds it was pressed in, which is a nice bit of trivia and also the fastest way to spot it in a crowded case. Parmigiano-Reggiano is a legally protected name with a minimum aging requirement and a production zone in northern Italy, and the wheels are inspected and stamped before they can carry the name, which is a good part of why a wedge costs what it costs. Standing at the case, all of that history collapses into one question: how hard is the paste under your thumb, because the harder it is, the finer you grate it and the later it goes into the pan.

Two things happen as these age. Moisture drops, so the texture goes from sliceable to snappy to crumbly. And enzymes keep breaking proteins into free amino acids, which is where the sharpness comes from. Some of those amino acids, tyrosine mainly, eventually reach a concentration where they crystallize, and those are the crunchy white bits in an old gouda or a wedge of Parmigiano. Those crystals are the most reliable visual sign at the store that a cheese has real age on it, and they crunch between your teeth rather than dissolving the way a grain of salt would.

What this means at the stove:

-   Young to medium cheddar melts. Extra-sharp aged cheddar breaks. If you want cheddar flavor in a sauce, use a mix: mostly medium for the melt, a handful of sharp for the taste.
-   Grate the hard ones fine and add them off the heat, or at the very end. Boiling a hard cheese in a sauce is how you get grit.
-   Save the Parmigiano rinds. Toss one into a pot of beans, soup, or tomato sauce and let it simmer. It softens, gives up a savory depth you cannot get any other way, and you fish it out at the end. Throwing them away is the closest thing I have to a kitchen pet peeve.
-   Asiago sits interestingly across this line, sold both young and semi-soft and aged into a hard grating cheese, and the guide to [asiago cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/information-about-asiago-cheese) covers where each version belongs.

These keep the longest of any category. Wrapped well and kept cold, a hard cheese is measured in weeks and months, not days. If a small spot of surface mold appears on a firm or hard block, cut [at least an inch](http://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/molds-food-are-they-dangerous) around and below it and use the rest. That trimming rule applies only to firm and hard cheeses. On any soft, fresh, or shredded cheese, mold means the whole thing goes in the trash, because the moisture lets it run further than you can see.

## Where does blue cheese fit in the lineup?

Blue is its own family, defined by a mold that was put there on purpose and then given air to grow. The cheesemaker adds _Penicillium roqueforti_ (or a relative) to the milk or curd, and then pierces the young wheel with needles to open channels. Mold needs oxygen, so the veins follow the needle tracks. That is why the blue in a wheel runs in lines and patches rather than uniformly.

The category spans a huge range of texture, which trips people up. Gorgonzola dolce is soft enough to spread. Roquefort is moist and crumbly and made from sheep milk. Stilton is firmer and more restrained. Cabrales will take the top of your head off. Grouping them all as “[blue cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/types-of-blue-cheese)” and expecting one behavior is like expecting all red wine to taste the same.

The flavor comes from the mold breaking down fat into compounds that read as peppery, sharp, and a little metallic, alongside a salt level that runs higher than most cheeses. High salt plus high fat plus sharp acid is why blue works so well against sweetness: honey, pears, figs, port. Blue carries enough salt that sugar lands as relief on the palate, which is why a drizzle of honey over Roquefort or a slice of pear under Gorgonzola has stayed on menus for a century.

In cooking, a small amount goes a very long way. Two ounces crumbled into a cream sauce will flavor a pot of pasta for four. Blue melts loosely rather than smoothly, breaking into a grainy sauce if you push it, so pull it off the heat early. If you are working out which style suits you or what to do with a wedge, the full guide to blue cheese goes deeper, including the softer young styles covered under [fresh blue cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/buy-fresh-blue-cheese).

Store blue away from everything else, and I mean it. The spores travel. A wedge of Roquefort in an open container next to a soft cheese will happily colonize its neighbor.

## What are pasta filata, or stretched-curd, cheeses?

Pasta filata means “spun paste,” and it describes cheeses whose curd is heated in hot water and then stretched and folded by hand or machine until it turns glossy and elastic. Mozzarella, provolone, scamorza, caciocavallo, and the string cheese in your kid’s lunchbox are all made this way.

The stretching aligns the proteins into long parallel fibers, which is where the pull comes from. It is the same principle as kneading bread dough into gluten strands, and it is the reason string cheese peels into ropes along one direction and not the other. Nothing else in the cheese world does this.

The family splits in two by moisture. Fresh mozzarella, the kind sitting in water or whey, is soft, milky, and mild, and it belongs on a caprese or torn over a pizza that just came out of the oven. Low-moisture mozzarella, the dry block or the shredded bag, has had more water pressed out and a bit of aging, which makes it saltier, firmer, and the better performer under a broiler. It browns, it blisters, it stretches. Fresh mozzarella on a pizza gives you wet spots and pale cheese unless you drain it hard first.

Provolone is the aged branch. Provolone dolce is young and mild, a deli standard. Provolone piccante is aged longer with a different enzyme in the make, and it turns sharp and prickly in a way that has nothing to do with the pale slices on an Italian sub. Ask for the piccante at a good counter and see the difference.

Scamorza is worth seeking out if you have an Italian market nearby. It is essentially a drier mozzarella, often smoked, and it melts under a broiler with a nuttiness that plain mozzarella does not have. Layer it into an eggplant bake and see if anyone asks what you did differently. Where each of these fits in its home tradition is covered further in the guide to [italian cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/types-of-italian-cheese).

## Is processed cheese really cheese?

Yes, with an asterisk that is right there on the label. Processed cheese starts with real cheese, usually young cheddar or colby, which is ground, heated, and combined with emulsifying salts (sodium citrate or sodium phosphate) that keep the fat and protein from separating when it melts. Whether a product can call itself “pasteurized process cheese,” “cheese food,” or “cheese product” depends on how much actual cheese is in it, with the terms further down that list holding less.

The emulsifying salts are the entire point, and they do something no natural cheese can. A slice of American melts into a smooth, uniform, glossy sheet at any temperature you throw at it, and it will not break, split, or go oily. That is better melting than any aged cheese can manage, and it holds that way in a low oven or on a burger straight off a hot pan.

Which is why a burger with a slice of American on it is right, and a burger with a slice of good aged cheddar on it is a slightly greasy disappointment. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not paid attention to what happens in the pan. Use the good cheddar on the board and the plastic-wrapped square on the burger, and let nobody make you feel fancy-schmancy about it either way.

The same chemistry is available to you without buying slices. Whisk 2 teaspoons of sodium citrate (about 11 grams) into 1 cup of milk over low heat, then add 8 ounces of grated cheese a handful at a time, and any cheese you like, including a sharp aged cheddar, melts into a completely smooth sauce that will not break. It is sold as sour salt or citrate in some spice aisles and easily online, and it is the single best trick for stovetop mac and cheese.

Where processed cheese falls down is flavor and texture cold. It is bland by design and slightly rubbery straight from the fridge, and it will contribute nothing to a cheese board. Use it for what it is good at.

## How does cheese tradition shift by country?

The same handful of techniques show up everywhere, but each region leans on the ones that matched its climate, its animals, and its need to store food through a winter.

Mountain regions produced big hard wheels because a large low-moisture wheel keeps for a year and can be carried down from a summer pasture. That gives you gruyère, comté, emmental, and the alpine cheeses generally, and it is the reason those are the ones I buy in a half-pound chunk and expect to still be cooking with in a month. Wet lowland regions with good grazing and short distances to market developed soft and bloomy cheeses that get eaten young; northern France is full of them, and those are a two-day purchase, bought for a specific dinner and not a day earlier. Hot dry regions where cow dairying is hard turned to sheep and goats, which is why the Mediterranean and the Middle East run heavy on feta, halloumi, pecorino, and brined fresh cheeses that keep in salt. Anything that was invented to survive without refrigeration is going to be forgiving in your kitchen too.

That history is doing real work on a Tuesday. If a recipe came out of a mountain tradition, it wants a hard cheese grated fine and it will take heat: fondue, gratins, a wheel’s worth of rind in the soup pot. If it came from a lowland dairy region, the cheese is the finish and not the cooking fat, so it goes on at the table or in the last two minutes. If it came from a hot dry country, the cheese was built to hold its shape over fire, which is why halloumi and queso fresco sear and brie would puddle. Read the dish’s home address and you already know whether the cheese goes in early or late.

Three traditions worth knowing separately, because each has a logic of its own:

-   France covers nearly every category on this page, and its bloomy and washed-rind cheeses in particular are the reference point everyone else is copying. The full guide to french cheese is the place to go if that is where you are headed.
-   Italy leans hard on stretched-curd cheeses and on long-aged grating cheeses, plus the whey cheeses like ricotta that come from making the others. The guide to italian cheese lays out that family.
-   Mexico’s cheeses split neatly by function, the fresh crumbling ones like queso fresco and cotija for finishing, and the melting ones like Oaxaca (a stretched-curd cheese, wound into a ball) and asadero for anything hot. The guide to [mexican cheese](https://tastessence.com/food-facts-kitchen-tips/guide-to-understand-mexican-cheese-types) covers which does what.

Protected-origin rules add a layer worth understanding at the counter. Names like Parmigiano-Reggiano, Roquefort, and Gorgonzola are legally restricted in the European Union to cheese made in a defined zone by a defined method. That is why the green shaker of “parmesan” and a wedge of true Parmigiano-Reggiano are not the same product and do not taste remotely alike. Similar rules govern Comté, Camembert de Normandie, and a long list of others. Outside the EU the naming rules are looser, so an American-made “gruyere” is a real cheese made by someone, just not the Swiss one.

None of this means the protected version is always the right buy. A domestic cheddar-style cheese made well beats an indifferent imported wheel, and a twelve dollar bottle of wine has been improving my dinners for two decades. Buy the one that tastes good.

## How do you use these categories to build a cheese board?

Pick one cheese from each texture family and stop at four or five. That single rule does more for a board than anything else, because contrast is the thing people are actually responding to when they say a board is good.

A four-cheese board that always works:

-   Something fresh or soft and mild: chèvre, or a small round of burrata.
-   Something bloomy: a wedge of brie or a whole small camembert.
-   Something firm and aged: a good cheddar, a manchego, or an aged gouda with crystals in it.
-   Something with attitude: a blue, or a washed rind if your crowd is game.

Add a fifth only if it fills a gap the other four leave, like a semi-soft for the people who want something easy, or a stretched-curd for a bit of chew.

Quantity: plan on roughly two ounces of cheese per person if there is other food, and three to four ounces if the board is the meal. Buy fewer cheeses in bigger pieces rather than many tiny slivers. A board with four generous wedges looks abundant; the same money spread across eight scraps looks picked over before anyone starts.

Take everything out of the refrigerator 45 minutes to an hour before serving. Cold fat does not release aroma, so a cold board tastes like a fraction of what you paid for. This is the whole game and it is free.

A few things that make a board easier to eat:

-   Give each cheese its own knife, especially the blue. One knife across all four and everything tastes like the blue by the third guest.
-   Cut the first slice or two of each cheese before guests arrive. People will not be the first to cut into a whole wheel, and you will find the board untouched an hour in.
-   Space them apart on the board so the strong smells stay near their own cheese.
-   Sweet and salty accompaniments do most of the work: honey, fig jam, grapes, apple slices, marcona almonds, cornichons, a cured meat if you like. Plain crackers, not flavored ones. The cheese is the flavor.

Sequence matters more than people expect. Go mild to strong, fresh to aged to blue. Start on the Roquefort and everything after it tastes muted.

If you want the board to feel deliberate rather than assembled, pick a through-line. All sheep milk. All from one country. All from one shop’s counter with the counter person’s advice. A theme reads as intent, and it is the easiest way to look like you know what you are doing.

## Quick answers: common cheese-type questions

### Why do some cheeses have holes?

Gas, and in the good ones it is a sign of flavor. Bacteria added during the make give off carbon dioxide as the cheese ages, and it collects into pockets inside the paste. In emmental and Swiss-style cheeses that is _Propionibacterium_ doing the work, and the same bacteria produce the compounds behind that sweet nutty taste, so the holes and the flavor tend to arrive together. Warmer aging rooms make bigger holes. At the counter, ask for your piece cut from nearer the middle of the wheel than the end, because a slice that is more hole than cheese slides off a sandwich and you paid by weight for the air. The small irregular openings in a Havarti or a young gouda have a much duller cause, air trapped between curds that were not pressed tightly, and they tell you nothing at all about how it will taste.

### Are you supposed to eat the rind?

Eat the bloomy and washed rinds, and taste the hard ones before you decide. On a brie or a taleggio the rind is where most of the flavor concentrated, and a guest who carefully scrapes it off is eating the boring part on purpose. Natural rinds on hard cheeses, the dusty gray-brown exterior of a big alpine wheel, are edible but leathery, and I trim those and drop them in the soup pot where they earn their keep. Wax, cloth, and bark bands come off, and so does any rind with a printed label glued to it. When you are unsure, taste a sliver right there at the board: sweet, mushroomy, or beefy means eat it, while ammonia or wet-basement means get the knife.

### How can I tell a young cheese from an aged one at the store?

Look at the paste. Young cheese is pale, even in color, moist-looking, and flexible when you bend the wedge. Aged cheese is darker toward the rind, drier, cracks instead of bending, and often shows those white crystal specks. Labels help too: a stated age in months, or the words “reserve,” “extra-aged,” “vecchio,” or “stravecchio,” means real time in a cave. My rule standing at the case is to buy young when the cheese is going into a pan and old when it is going onto a plate, and the crystal specks are the one thing I will happily pay a few dollars more for.

### What does a cheese’s fat percentage on the label actually mean?

Ignore it, mostly. European labels give fat as a percentage of dry matter rather than of the whole cheese, so a soft cheese can say 60% and still carry less fat by weight than a hard one at 45%. The measure exists because water content swings so wildly from one category to the next that dry matter is the only way a cheesemaker can line two wheels up against each other. For the person holding the package, it is a manufacturing spec that got printed on the outside. If you are shopping for the decadent one, look for triple-crème on the label, press the wedge with your thumb, and skip the arithmetic entirely.

### Can I freeze cheese?

You can, and the texture pays for it, so freeze only what has a hot dish waiting for it. Ice crystals rupture the structure, and the cheese comes out crumblier and drier than it went in. Hard and semi-hard cheeses take it best: shred first, freeze flat in a bag with the air pressed out, and cook it straight from frozen without thawing. Use it within two to three months, while it still tastes like the cheese you bought. Fresh and soft cheeses come out weeping and grainy and I would not waste the freezer space, though cream cheese headed for a cheesecake or a batter is fine, since the graininess beats out and bakes away. Anything you bought for a cheese board should never see the inside of a freezer.

### What’s the difference between rennet and acid-set cheese?

Rennet is an enzyme that gets milk proteins to link into a firm, elastic curd you can cut, cook, press, and age. Acid alone (lemon juice, vinegar, or a culture producing lactic acid) gives a softer, more fragile curd that drains into a fresh cheese. Nearly every aged cheese uses rennet. This lands on you twice. At the stove, the acid-set ones are the cheeses you can make yourself on a weeknight, and homemade paneer or quick ricotta wants about twenty minutes, a heavy pot, and a lemon you already have. At the store, traditional rennet comes from animal stomach, so if you are cooking for a vegetarian, read the package for microbial or vegetable rennet before you commit. Parmigiano-Reggiano and most of the traditional hard wheels use the animal kind, with no way around it, so build that board with an aged gouda or a cheddar that says microbial and nobody has to eat around anything.

### Is cheese safe to eat during pregnancy?

[Public health guidance](https://www.fda.gov/food/health-educators/listeria-food-safety-moms-be) in the United States advises avoiding soft cheeses made from unpasteurized milk during pregnancy, including soft-ripened and blue-veined styles, because of listeria risk. Soft cheeses made from pasteurized milk are considered safe, as are hard cheeses generally. Read the label for “pasteurized,” and check with your own doctor rather than a cheese article for anything that matters this much.

## Where to start if this was a lot

Buy one cheese you have never had from a counter with a person behind it, and ask them to cut you a small piece. Say what you already like and let them steer. That single habit will teach you more in a month than any list of names, including this one.

And keep a wedge of something firm and aged in the fridge at all times. It grates over pasta, it saves a sad salad, it fills in when there is nothing for dinner, and it will not spoil while you decide. My mother called that kind of ingredient an insurance policy, and after twenty years of weeknight dinners on a clock, I have never once regretted having one in the drawer.