How to Taste Cheese Properly: A Step-by-Step Method

To taste cheese properly: bring it to room temperature, work from mildest to strongest, look at it, break it and smell the fresh surface, then chew slowly and let it warm in your mouth before you judge anything. Exhale through your nose after you swallow, and count how long the flavour lasts. That is the method. Everything below is detail.

You do not need a certificate or forty adjectives. You need patience and the discipline not to swallow immediately. Most people taste cheese in about two seconds, standing at the fridge, at 4C. Do it properly once and you will taste things you have been missing for years.

Step 1: Get the temperature right

This is not fussiness. Fat carries aroma compounds and cold fat locks them up, so fridge-cold cheese tastes muted and waxy.

Take everything out 45 to 60 minutes before you taste, still wrapped, aiming for roughly 16 to 20C in the cheese itself. A big hard piece needs the full hour, a small soft one needs less. Unwrap about 15 minutes before you start so any trapped fridge smell can blow off.

Step 2: Put them in the right order

Tasting a Roquefort first will flatten everything that follows. Go gentle to loud:

1. Fresh cheeses (mozzarella, ricotta, fresh goat's log)
2. Soft bloomy rinds (brie, Camembert, triple creams)
3. Semi-hard (young Gouda, Havarti, Cornish Yarg)
4. Hard aged (Comté, cheddar, Manchego, Parmigiano Reggiano)
5. Washed rinds (Taleggio, Époisses)
6. Blues (Gorgonzola dolce, then Stilton, then Roquefort)

If two feel similar in strength, put the saltier one second. Salt accumulates on the palate faster than anything else.

Step 3: Cut it so the slice is fair

Every piece should contain both rind and centre, in the proportion the whole cheese has. On a wedge that means cutting lengthways from the point to the rind, not slicing the tip off. The tip and the rind edge taste completely different, especially on a ripe bloomy cheese.

Wipe the blade between cheeses. Blue transfers to everything.

Step 4: Look at it

Ten seconds, properly.

• The rind. Natural and craggy, bloomy and white, orange and sticky, waxed, cloth-bound? Each tells you how it was matured.
• The paste. Chalky white suggests goat, sheep or buffalo milk. Deep yellow suggests cow's milk from grass, or added annatto.
• Holes. Round shiny eyes mean gas from bacteria. Small irregular cracks mean mechanical openings from loosely pressed curd. More on why cheese has holes.
• Crystals. White crunchy specks: usually calcium lactate on a cheddar's surface, tyrosine inside an aged Gouda or Parmigiano. Both mean age.
• The breakdown line. On a ripe brie, a darker, softer band just under the rind means it is ripening properly from the outside in.

Step 5: Break it and smell the fresh surface

Do not sniff the rind. It smells of the cave and the wash, not the cheese. Break a piece in half with your fingers and smell the fresh break within a couple of seconds, before the volatiles blow off.

Short sniffs beat one long inhale. Your nose adapts to a smell within about 20 seconds, so if you draw a blank, put it down and come back.

Washed rinds are the classic trap. Époisses and Taleggio smell aggressively of feet, then taste sweet, fruity and creamy. Rind smell is a poor predictor of flavour.

Step 6: Texture first, in the mouth

Put a piece the size of a large fingernail on your tongue and press it against the roof of your mouth instead of chewing straight away. Give it five seconds to warm, then chew slowly.

Words that actually describe something:

• Chalky: dries the tongue, breaks into powder. Young goat's cheeses.
• Crumbly: falls apart in flakes. Wensleydale, Cheshire, young Lancashire.
• Supple: bends without breaking. Young Gouda, Morbier.
• Springy: bounces back. Halloumi, Emmental.
• Fudgy: dense and yielding, coats the teeth. Aged Gouda.
• Crystalline: audible crunch. Parmigiano Reggiano, very old cheddar.
• Oozing: flows at room temperature. Ripe Camembert.

Step 7: Then flavour, and the finish

Now the five basic tastes your tongue actually detects: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Judge salt and acidity first, because those two shape everything else. A little bitterness is normal in some rinds, but a strong bitter note usually means an over-aged or badly stored cheese.

Swallow, then breathe out gently through your nose. The single most useful trick in tasting anything. Most of what you experience as flavour is aroma reaching your nose from the back of your mouth, and you only notice it on the exhale.

Then count. The finish is how long the flavour lasts after you swallow. A young mild cheese vanishes in five seconds. A great aged Comté or a 24-month cheddar will still be going at 30 or 40 seconds. Length of finish is the clearest marker separating a good cheese from a brilliant one.

Step 8: Clean your palate

Between cheeses, take a sip of still water at room temperature and a small bite of plain bread or a neutral water biscuit. Not a rosemary and sea salt cracker. Not fig chutney. Those are lovely with cheese and useless for tasting it. For very fatty or very salty cheeses, crisp apple works better than bread. Wait 30 seconds before the next one.

Save the wine, chutney and honey for after the tasting, when the comparing is done and the eating starts. That is a different and very enjoyable exercise, and our guide to unexpected cheese pairings is the place to start.

Building a vocabulary that means something

Tasting notes are useless unless the words map onto real sensations. Here are the common ones with an anchor you can check against.

• Lactic: plain full-fat yoghurt, crème fraîche. Fresh cheeses.
• Nutty: toasted hazelnut, walnut skin. Comté, Gruyère, Manchego.
• Brothy: beef stock, Marmite, soy sauce. Aged hard cheeses.
• Fruity: tinned pear, or the pineapple note in properly aged Somerset cheddar.
• Butterscotch: aged Gouda, unmistakably.
• Grassy: cut grass, a dry hay bale. Summer-milk alpine cheeses.
• Mushroomy: raw button mushroom, damp cellar. Bloomy rinds.
• Barnyard: warm hay plus animal. Common in washed rinds and aged goat's cheese, and a positive in balance.
• Piquant: the tingle at the back of the throat from blue cheese.
• Ammoniacal: sharp, like cleaning fluid. A faint whiff on a soft rind is normal, a strong one means it is past it.

Do not reach for a word you would not use in conversation. "Tastes like the inside of a Christmas cake tin" is a better note than "complex".

How to run a tasting at home

Six people, six cheeses, about 90 minutes.

1. Pick one theme. One milk across styles, one country, or a vertical: the same cheddar at 6, 12 and 24 months, which is the most revealing tasting there is.
2. Buy 30 to 40g of each cheese per person. Six people and six cheeses is roughly 1.2kg to 1.4kg in total.
3. Number the plates and lay them out in order of intensity, clockwise from the top.
4. Consider going blind. Cover the labels, especially prices. They bias people enormously.
5. Put out room temperature water, plain bread and a discard bowl. Nobody has to finish anything.
6. Give everyone a scorecard: look, smell, texture, flavour, plus a mark out of ten. Written notes stop everyone copying the loudest person in the room.
7. Reveal at the end, then open the wine and let people eat properly.

Quick answers

How many cheeses can I taste at once? Five or six, before palate fatigue sets in. After that everything just tastes salty.

Should I eat the rind? Taste it separately. Bloomy and washed rinds are edible and full of flavour. Natural rinds on hard cheeses are edible but often gritty. Wax, cloth and bark are not.

Does it matter what I drink? For tasting, water only. For enjoying, almost anything: sweet wine with blue, cider with cheddar, gin more often than you would expect.

Why do my tasting notes all sound the same? Because the cheeses are too similar. Put a fresh goat's cheese next to an aged Gouda and the contrast hands you the words.

Write it down while the cheese is still in your mouth. After thirty or forty honest entries you will have a real map of your own palate. Plan a lineup from the cheese catalogue and keep your notes in the cheese tracker.