Every cheese this dive writes about, in one filterable list — 289 of them, across 18 regions and every family. Filter by milk, by family, by where it comes from, or by whether there is a formula for it in the collection. Each entry links to the page that actually argues the case.
Showing all 289 cheeses.
also Kurut; qurut
Strained sour milk salted, shaped and dried hard on the roof of a ger — preservation by SUBTRACTION: fat out because fat goes rancid, water out because water spoils.
The third of the Savoyard cooked-pressed wheels, named for the valley and the cattle breed together.
A cone or pumpkin-shaped fresh-to-semi-cured cheese, often kneaded through with paprika. Treat the name's usual gloss as folk etymology.
The mild brined cheese of the Levantine table, named for Acre.
The Bavarian arm of the alpine tradition, and genuinely first-rate — if you have dismissed German cheese, start here.
Germany's protected Emmental, from the same corner of the Alps as the Bergkäse.
A soft goat cheese with caraway, from the same corner of Thuringia as the mite cheese.
Made from halloumi whey — a make you are handed rather than one you plan, because its quality was decided by the cheese before it.
Washed with a herbal brine whose recipe is a genuine trade secret — protection with nothing in law behind it, doing marketing work as well.
also Karish
The plain fresh skimmed acid-set curd — and what mish is made from before the jar gets it.
The modern flagship of a country that was once one of the world's great cheddar exporters — and it is bandage-wrapped in the traditional way.
Fresh, crumbly and mild, eaten alongside spiced dishes as a cooling counterweight — an enormous cattle population and no aged-cheese tradition.
One of the smaller Portuguese cardoon cheeses in the same idiom as Serra da Estrela.
A Portuguese colonial cheese that outlived its colony — kneaded into discs, salt-cured, and smoked over a fire of dried cow-dung cakes.
Wrapped in brown chestnut leaves and tied with raffia, which both protects and flavours it: the vessel is an ingredient.
A raw-milk farmhouse Brie-de-Meaux-style cheese — British makers doing with raw milk what France's own appellations are arguing about.
Concave-sided from the traditional wooden hoop, and intensely floral when made from summer alp milk.
One of the very few British cheeses in the sheep tradition the climate never demanded — from the same Devon dairy as Harbourne Blue.
also Hobelkäse
The same cheese young and then aged for years to the point where it is shaved with a plane.
"White cheese" — the centre of the Turkish breakfast, close kin to feta and, since 2005, legally not it.
Made only in summer on the high pastures in stone huts called calècc, and it will age ten years and more — the season argument in its most absolute form.
From the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac — the monastic tradition in Quebec is not a historical curiosity, it is a going concern.
One of the French cow's-milk blues — generally rounder and less saline than Roquefort.
The Jura's blue, made in the same mountains as Comté and from the same herds.
Farmhouse gouda whose protection REQUIRES raw milk — a TSG protects a method rather than a place, and it is the exact inverse of Stilton's rule.
A cone of fresh curd worked with parsley, tarragon, pepper and cloves and rubbed with paprika — reputedly born of using up buttermilk curd and Maroilles trimmings.
Caș cut, salted and worked to a paste, then packed into a fir-bark tube — a curd made and then deliberately unmade.
also Brie
The large flat one — and the raw-milk protected version is a considerably more assertive cheese than supermarket brie.
A triple-crème — and the number attached to those is routinely misunderstood, because it is fat in dry matter, not fat in the cheese.
Corsica's answer to ricotta, from sheep's or goat's whey — eaten fresh in everything, or aged as brocciu passu.
also Gjetost; Gudbrandsdalsost; mysost
Not a cheese: no coagulation at all — whey reduced with cream until it browns, and the browning is predominantly Maillard rather than caramelisation.
also Fromage de Bruxelles
Skimmed sour milk, salted and ripened, sharp and lean — Belgium's entry in the ledger of cheeses made by people who sold the butterfat.
also Bryndza
Soft, salty, crumbly sheep's cheese from the same shepherding as oscypek — the cheese the region actually eats rather than photographs.
The Romansh-speaking alps' version of the same wheel.
Mozzarella made into a pouch and filled with stracciatella — shredded curd in cream. The 1956 attribution is not printed here as fact.
A cream cheese rolled in toasted oatmeal. Its fifteenth-century origin story is tradition rather than record.
Ripened in actual limestone caves in the Picos de Europa, traditionally wrapped in maple leaves, and one of the most aggressive cheeses in circulation.
Gourd-shaped, tied in pairs and hung over a pole — "cheese on horseback", and the audible root of the Balkans' kashkaval.
From the near-feral Podolica breed, which gives very little milk and only seasonally — scarce for biological reasons rather than marketing ones.
Young, moist, faintly lemony, and a casualty of the war years that came back — the miners'-cheese story is left as tradition, not record.
A modern industrial invention and a trademark — bloomy rind plus blue veining plus cream. Protection of a business rather than a place, and genuinely good.
also Camembert
Raw milk, ladle-moulded — and the 2018 "peace deal" that would have admitted pasteurised milk is reported everywhere and is not in force.
Metton — ripened skimmed-milk curd — melted with water and butter into a pourable savoury cream. A skimmed-milk cheese from a butter region.
The plain fresh drained curd everything else on the page starts from — eaten fresh, salted into telemea, packed into a burduf, or made into urdă. One curd, four cheeses.
Ireland's farmhouse blue, and part of a tradition Ireland largely built rather than rebuilt.
Hand-pulled pasta filata from Modicana cow's milk — a hard, aged, pear-shaped stretched-curd cheese almost nobody knows exists.
A pressed cheese that develops blue veining with age without ever being inoculated as a blue.
also Frue
Fresh acid-set curd eaten within days — the everyday cheese under all the famous ones.
A pecorino deliberately colonised by the cheese fly, eaten with the larvae alive — prohibited under Italian and EU law and locally protected at the same time.
also Civil; chechil
Cheese pulled into fine threads and wound into a braid — pasta filata taken to its extreme: not stretched into a ball, stretched into hair.
Brined and aged in the clay pot it is named for.
Taller, denser and more crumbly-centred than a brie — a lactic set, so a chalky core is correct rather than unripe.
The Georgian and Armenian string cheese, cognate with Turkish çeçil, usually braided and often smoked.
Cheddaring is a verb — the milled, stacked, salted-in-the-curd method. The white specks in an old one are calcium lactate, not tyrosine.
A squeaky curd is a curd made in the last day or so — the only sensory quality check in this whole dive a customer can perform in a shop, and the mechanism is given as generally explained, not from a primary source.
Older than cheddar in the record, crumblier, saltier, traditionally orange with annatto — and its salt-pasture terroir story is not printed here as fact.
Fresh goat cheese, lactic-set over a long slow acidification — the tang is the goat milk's fatty-acid profile as much as the acid.
The same curd as paneer, not pressed — soft, moist, crumbly, and the base of rasgulla, sandesh and rasmalai.
Yak or chauri milk, acid-set from the skimmed residue after the butter — the hard form is eaten by slow chewing over an hour.
An abbey cheese, several of them washed in the abbey's own beer — the most Belgian possible answer to what to wash a cheese with.
also Lor
The skimmed and whey cheeses. As everywhere in this wing, the by-product has a name and a use.
A cheddar washed with COLD water — a gouda's hot wash raises the vat, Colby's drops it. Joseph Steinwand, Colby, 1885, arriving independently at the Dutch lever.
Still made in fruitières — around 500 litres of milk a wheel, which is why the co-operative had to be invented before the cheese could exist.
Wrapped in nettle leaves that form an edible rind — 1980s rather than ancient, and "Yarg" is Gray backwards.
Never cooked — the curd is broken, crumbled, dry-salted, beaten and held under a stone. Mexico's IMPI REFUSED it a denominación de origen as generic.
Curd cut, drained and dressed with cream — and the vinegar and lemon-juice routes are genuinely different cheeses, which is why they are separate recipes.
A sharp white cheddar aged at least a year and sold exclusively in 30-ounce TINS — the result of government-funded research into keeping cheese in cans.
Made from cream as well as milk — the commercial version carries a stabiliser, which is why it behaves differently in a cheesecake than a homemade one.
also Crottin
Small goat button with the wrinkled Geotrichum surface rather than smooth velvet; the name's etymology is left unsettled here.
A simple fresh acid-set curd — the plainest thing in the section and probably the oldest kind of cheese in Britain.
Buttermilk curd salted, dried and sealed in clay pots, where it goes blue on its own — no spore packet, no piercing, no needles.
A cow's-milk blue created explicitly as an alternative to Roquefort — honest about being an imitation that became its own thing.
Denmark's square everyday cheese, sometimes with caraway.
Curdled with papaya leaf juice — papain, a cysteine protease — and pressed into coconut shells.
Salt goes into the MILK before the rennet at 8–15%, so the set takes hours — the one cheese that never waits for salt to travel.
A skimmed-milk blue made from what was left after the cream went to butter — England's entry in the sour-milk, sold-the-butterfat ledger.
Whole milk with the evening cream — and the wheel they chase down Cooper's Hill. Single Gloucester has the PDO; Double does not.
An aged Monterey Jack that got there BY ACCIDENT, in storage — and the one extra-hard cheese with an exit, since a failed age costs only a Jack.
Lower fat, firmer, famously spherical and waxed — and the wax is a seal, not a rind.
also Emmental
The eyes — and the wheels made enormous partly by a 19th-century customs rule that charged duty per wheel rather than by weight.
Washed with marc de Bourgogne until the rind is brick-orange, and sold in a wooden box because at full ripeness it will not hold itself together.
One of the everyday Nordic table cheeses — semi-hard, washed-curd, excellent, and mostly invisible abroad.
A catch-all for pressed, drained fresh curd — firmer than cottage cheese, drier than quark.
Sheep, or sheep with up to 30% goat — and the 2005 judgment that reserved the name to Greece is the wing's capstone: a name decided to be a place.
Raw sheep's milk, smoked, aged hard — the island's own pecorino, and quite different from the Roman one.
The cream version Anne Hov invented in 1863 and called feitost, "fat cheese" — the invention recorded in the name.
The Italian-speaking alps doing the alpine thing in their own idiom.
Wrapped in cloth and buried in tufa pits for about three months — interred in summer, dug out in late November. The vessel is an ingredient.
The tall cylinder among the French blues, and among the mildest of them.
"Frisian nail cheese" — cloves and cumin, the cloves looking like nails. Four hundred years of the spice trade stuck in a wheel.
Drained sour milk, smooth rather than curdy, and the base of a lot of French cooking — quark's French twin.
also Tomme au marc
Cheeses finished in, or made from, grape pomace and leftovers — the thrifty end of a cuisine usually described as luxurious.
"Old cheese" — skimmed sour milk, no rennet, ripened with mould into something dry, brown and ferociously pungent.
A matured brine-washed cheese with a reputation for being the strongest thing in any Danish refrigerator.
A goat's-milk tomme with a grey-blue natural rind — effectively extinct, and brought back in the 1980s.
Two quite different cheeses under one name — dolce, young and barely blue; piccante, aged and assertive. Its due paste method is another "not enough cows".
The archetype of washing the curd — take the sugar away and the acid stops. Young and aged gouda are effectively two cheeses under one name.
Not a lesser Parmigiano, a differently specified one — it permits silage, and therefore permits egg-white lysozyme against the same bacterium.
The great Greek hard cheese, gruyère-descended in name and idea. If you think Greek cheese means feta, this is the correction.
Sweden's Emmental-adjacent eyed cheese, and one of the everyday table set.
Legitimate, protected, and a different cheese from Swiss Le Gruyère AOP — a rare case of two names coexisting rather than one winning.
Aged for months inside sheepskin sacks that are themselves called gudas — the cheese is named after its container.
also Hellim; Χαλλούμι
Cooked before it is brined, which is why it fries — and its 2021 PDO describes a cheese that does not exist yet: the milk ratio is a schedule, not a description.
Hand-shaped sour-milk cheese, eaten "mit Musik" — onions and vinegar — and stocked everywhere without anyone calling it historical.
Beenleigh's goat sibling — the same dairy proving the milk, not the climate, was the constraint.
Sauermilchkäse — and in Germany alone the skimmed sour-milk cheese is a supermarket product rather than a heritage curiosity.
Hanne Nielsen went round Europe learning other people's cheesemaking and came home and built something that was not a copy — and it got a PGI in 2019 over US objection, protection running backwards.
A Swedish table cheese in the semi-hard washed-curd idiom.
Belgium's one protected cheese, small, square and uncompromising — and the case where the protected name did not save the cheese.
A bloomy goat cheese with a line of vegetable ash through the middle — probably the single most recognisable American artisan cheese.
also Idiazábal
Pressed sheep's milk, often smoked — because the cheeses hung in shepherds' huts. The smoke was a side effect of the accommodation before it was a style.
Fresh, mild, lightly brined, and the everyday cheese — most khachapuri is imeruli and sulguni together.
From cows fed partly on draff, the spent grain from a whisky distillery. Whether you taste the whisky is opinion; that the feed changes the milk is not.
Dried, hard, salted balls of soured milk or whey, reconstituted into the sauce for mansaf. Included as reported rather than verified.
The Maghreb's fresh cheese, alongside its dried keeping cousin klila.
The generic white cheese — which is the honest name for a family rather than a single product.
One of the frontier cheeses, mostly unfamiliar even within India.
A skimmed-and-collected surface-cream product, salted and ripened — a boundary case, and the fuzzy edge is where the local staples live.
also Kaladi
Created to keep milk solid through hot summers, and BACK-SLOPPED: the acidifier is the last batch — an accidental mother culture.
A hard Swiss-influenced cheese from a Jesuit dairy in the Darjeeling hills — another foreign transplant that put down roots.
Dried, hard, keeping curd — the Caucasian relative of the Central Asian dried curds.
Hard, lean and sharp — the everyday working cheese of the Dutch north.
A large-format alpine-style cheese, unmistakably a gruyère by descent — the usual 19th-century Swiss explanation is reported, not verified.
also Eski kaşar
Turkey's most-eaten hard cheese, young and aged — the Anatolian end of the kashkaval belt.
also Kaşkaval; kaškaval
Aged stretched curd running from the Balkans into Anatolia — and the shared root with Italy's caciocavallo, "cheese on horseback", is audible.
The Greek member of the kashkaval / kaşkaval / caciocavallo family — one stretched-curd tradition, five languages.
Between kefalotyri and graviera, as the name says — hard, salty, and a grating cheese with more body than most.
Hard, salty and what saganaki is properly made with.
Fresh white carabao-milk cheese, traditionally wrapped in banana leaf — another entry in "the vessel is an ingredient".
also Khoya
Milk reduced by long open boiling until it is a solid — concentration by heat, no coagulant, and the same idea as brunost and Japan's so.
The dried, hard, keeping cousin of jben — another entry in the dried-curd belt that runs from Central Asia through the Himalaya.
Repeatedly kneaded during ripening to spread a blue-ish mould through the paste — a blue made by hand alone: no needles, no spore packet.
The basket-shaped one in the Sauermilchkäse set — stocked everywhere and thought of as ordinary, not as heritage.
Cooked over an open wood fire in a copper cauldron, in mountain chalets, in summer only — the oldest surviving method in the country, and the smoke gets in.
Strained yoghurt — acid-set and drained, so structurally a fresh cheese by the same reasoning that makes skyr one. Whether you call it cheese is a naming convention.
Matured in oil — the rind treatment that is not a rind at all.
Salers' neighbour in the cheddar-adjacent tradition of huge pressed Auvergnat cylinders.
Humphrey Errington's sheep's-milk blue on an explicitly Roquefort-inspired model — and the British echo of the raw-milk wars.
A two-curd cheese: one day's curd held back and blended with the next. "Not enough cows" solved by the calendar, and the crumble is the proof.
Deliberately never turned during aging, so the top sinks into a well called the fontaine — a cheese defined by a step somebody left out.
also Gruyère
Dense, with no meaningful eyes despite the cartoon — and held generic in the United States in 2023, partly on the strength of the FDA's own 1977 standard of identity.
Named for a painter — one of the bloomy and washed-rind cheeses of the Quebec artisan revival.
also Leyden; Boeren-Leidse met sleutels
Shot through with cumin seed — and the crossed keys of Leiden branded into the rind are inside the protected name, which is protection by branding iron.
also Juustoleipä; bread cheese
Traditionally from colostrum, then baked or flambéed so the surface chars in patches — the only cheese in this collection that goes in an oven.
Created in the 1890s, discontinued in the 1980s, and later revived from preserved cultures — reported rather than verified, and worth naming for what it demonstrates.
The archetype of smear-ripening and the reference point for B. linens — named for a duchy, mostly made in Germany, and with exactly one US producer.
also Le Colonel
Bound with five bands of reed or raffia, which hold its shape while the paste softens; the nickname comes free.
One of Armenia's brined semi-hard table cheeses.
Cow's milk — unusual for Spain — matured in cloth and rubbed with oil and paprika, giving that orange squared-off wheel.
also Mainzer Käse
Another of the everyday Sauermilchkäse: skimmed, soured, surface-ripened, and routine.
Goat's milk with the rind rubbed in gofio, the Canaries' toasted grain flour — a rind treatment that exists nowhere else because the ingredient does not.
The hard pressed sheep cheese that keeps — which is what a long dry summer asks for, and why Iberia is a sheep and goat region.
The luxurious one of the Greek whey cheeses — cream added back to the whey.
One of the working abbey cheeses — the monastic tradition as a going concern rather than a historical curiosity.
The north's square washed rind, with the monastic association the middle-ages page treats carefully rather than credulously.
Cream acidified — usually with tartaric or citric acid — and drained. Barely a cheese by some definitions, and the reason tiramisu works.
Made since the 1940s out of university dairy research, by the family better known for washing machines — American artisan cheese predating the 1980s revival.
Smoked pasta filata, from a mountain town that made a good cheese out of being on a trade route.
also Kelle
A hard sheep's-milk cheese, brined and grating-hard.
also Mellnkase
Ripened by mites in a box of rye flour and eaten with them still on it — and it survived because in 1970 one woman still knew how.
also Boule de Lille
A French answer to Edam whose rind is deliberately grazed by cheese mites — and which the FDA detained half a tonne of in 2013.
Layered with salt in an earthenware jar under buttermilk, whey and peppers for months or years — and the famous "3200 BC" date is a 2,000-year transcription error.
also Myzithra; anthotyros; manouri
One cheese under three names, made from the whey off feta and graviera — none of the names describes a method, because the method never changes.
A pungent, almost aggressively fermented soft cheese from the Bohinj valley.
A washed rind from the lakes, mild by the standards of its family.
Descended from the queso del país of the Spanish California missions, and the mildest of its family.
The soot line through the middle was the morning curd protected until the evening milking — "not enough cows", and the appearance outlived the function.
Sheep's curd packed with wild herbs into a skin bag or an earthenware pot and aged — skin bag, herbs and pot, all three at once.
also Fior di latte
The cultured pasta filata original — a different material from the quick acid-set kind, and the difference is structural rather than skill.
Genuinely a different cheese, richer and softer, because buffalo milk carries far more fat and protein than cow.
Mild, orange-rinded with annatto, and not to be confused with French Munster — the painted rind is an appearance that outlived its function.
also Munster-Géromé
The Alsatian washed rind — and not the mild American Muenster that borrowed the name and the spelling.
Mahlab and mastic go into the BOILING BRINE, and it is deliberately too salty until the cook soaks the salt back out — finished by whoever eats it.
Set, sweetened milk curds of Manchu and Mongol descent — northern China's dairy tradition arrived with steppe peoples rather than being absent.
Heart-shaped, and old enough that the shape has been claimed for the Hundred Years' War — treat that origin as folklore.
A small sour-milk cheese reportedly ripened wrapped in hop leaves — reported rather than verified here, and flagged as such on the page.
The one monastic cheese in the wing with a name and a date: Brother Alphonse Juin carried the Port-du-Salut recipe from Bellefontaine to the Trappists at Oka in 1893.
Small pungent discs of ripened sour-milk curd with almost no fat — and still industrially produced, which most of the skimmed-milk survivals are not.
Trappist, and washed in the beer the same abbey is better known for.
Made by hand with wooden tools from May to September, pressed in a carved spindle mould — and protected by a MEASUREMENT: 600–800 g, 17–23 cm.
Pressed sheep's milk, nutty, one of the great cheeses of Europe by any measure — and nearly invisible on American counters.
Oscypek's Slovak sibling, also smoked and moulded — the family resemblance is the Vlach migration rather than imitation.
Extra-aged gouda — a three- or four-year wheel is a genuinely different cheese from the young one, and full of tyrosine crystals.
A small brick-shaped washed rind with a reputation for clearing rooms.
Heat-acid, pressed firm, and it does not melt — which is exactly why it holds its cubes through twenty minutes of curry. Its origin is genuinely unresolved.
One of the fresh white cheeses eaten within days — the answer a hot, humid, cave-less climate gives, reached independently three times over.
Milk, rennet, salt and nothing else — the specification bans additives, bactofugation and microfiltration by name, so the only fix left is the farm.
Coagulated with pig rennet — pepsin, not chymosin — which should make it bitter and does not; traditionally the exclusive work of women.
Much saltier than Parmigiano as a deliberate ripening control — and the lamb rennet paste that sets it carries the pregastric esterase that IS the flavour.
The added-ingredient branch of the flavoured cheeses — and the practical rule is to steep dried additions in boiling water and drain, because dried is not sterile.
Named for a wind, and made from the milk of a herd kept on the islands — the other half of the Madeleine pair.
No casein, so no cross-linked protein network — which is why the melt is the hard part and starch and oil are doing the work instead.
Fresh drained curd — the everyday base for tarts and spreads.
An alpine-style raw-milk cheese made only from summer pasture milk — the season argument adopted deliberately by a modern maker rather than inherited.
Square, mild for the family, and part of Normandy's soft high-moisture answer to rich milk and short journeys.
A Trappist cheese, and the recipe Brother Alphonse Juin carried from Bellefontaine to Quebec in 1893, where it became Oka.
"Priest cheese" — historically paid as tithe in milk, and another of the Nordic everyday wheels.
Real casein made by a microorganism rather than an animal — the conclusion the family page declines to dodge.
also American cheese
America invented it and exported it — and the emulsifying salts turn out to be genuinely clever chemistry rather than a crime.
A thick disc of provolone grilled in a cast-iron pan until it blisters and goes molten — the asado course nobody outside Argentina expects.
Aged pasta filata, unusual for the family, and the piccante versions lean hard on lipase for the sharp note.
A large aged pasta filata from the Sorrentine peninsula, nothing like supermarket provolone.
The protected provolone, and the other place lamb rennet paste appears — the same pregastric esterase as Pecorino.
The donkey-milk cheese, reportedly the most expensive on earth — and its 60/40 donkey-goat blend is chemistry, not curiosity: donkey milk barely coagulates.
The other sour-milk survival, soft and laced with caraway — where the salt and the caraway are an off switch that stops the fermentation.
Trentino's washed rind, and its name means what you think it means.
Not a cheese people list, and the most-eaten dairy product in the country — every Sauermilchkäse starts here, and so do a great many cakes.
Raw milk, mountain-made, and the centre of Brazil's own raw-milk fight — years in a legal grey zone before the production was recognised.
Skewered and grilled over coals on the beach — it browns and squeaks and holds its shape, which is the grilling-cheese pattern again.
Frescal, meia-cura and curado — the same cheese at three ages, and the everyday cheese of a very large country.
A double-crusted ball: a hard rind of pressed cheese enclosing a soft buttery interior. Two textures in one wheel, and unlike anything in Europe.
Torta del Casar's neighbour and near-twin — cardoon-set, spoonable, bitter-edged, and nothing else in Europe eats quite like them.
"Hand cheese" — soft folded sheets, the Venezuelan relative of the quesillo.
also Queso blanco
Mild, salty, crumbly, and it HOLDS ITS SHAPE when heated — the high-pH, high-calcium behaviour that makes a cheese good for frying.
Hard and very salty, made on the plains where refrigeration was not — preservation by salt and dehydration rather than by a cave.
also Queso Chihuahua
A northern-European farmhouse cheese brought to the Chihuahuan desert by Mennonites in the 1920s — a cheese travelling with a people rather than a place.
also Quesillo
Stretched curd wound into a ball of continuous ribbon like a skein of wool, then pulled apart in strands. The 1885 Castellanos account is not printed as fact.
Smoked over almond shells, prickly pear or pine, and made in enormous wheels for an island cheese.
Made to be melted, and the melting is the point — the cut face heated and scraped onto potatoes. One of three answers to the emulsion problem.
Savoyard, the essential ingredient of tartiflette — and its name means "to milk again", the same observation as Belgium's remoudou.
An Italian-immigrant cheese made smaller and faster than its model — what happens when a technique crosses an ocean and meets a different scale of dairy.
Its name means "to milk again" — the same observation as Reblochon, two dialects 500 km apart: the last milk drawn is the fattiest.
The Portuguese whey cheese — the local ricotta, and the by-product cheese every good dairy region has.
The local ricotta, present across the whole region under variations of the same name. The by-product has a name.
Whey "recooked" — the second cheese out of what you were about to pour away, and the mechanism is heat plus acid, not rennet.
Ricotta left to ferment, stirred and salted for months until it is a spreadable, eye-watering paste.
Salted, pressed and aged ricotta — the practical answer when three awkward fresh yields would rather be one keeping round.
Small, lactic, goat — Piedmont's answer to the Loire.
World's Best Cheese 2019 — the first American cheese to take the title, and it is wrapped in Syrah grape leaves soaked in pear spirits.
Navarrese, pressed, sheep — the Pyrenean member of the Spanish hard-cheese group.
The Combalou caves, a claim running back to a charter of 1411, and defined as raw milk: pasteurise it and it is not Roquefort.
also 乳饼
A firm fresh goat cheese set with năiténg, made from a cultivated vine — sliced and fried, because it does not melt. China has a deep-fried cheese.
also Milk fan; 乳扇
Pulled into thin sheets and dried on a stick by the Bai people — and its coagulant is Chinese quince, not papaya: 木瓜 names both.
A fresh cheese smoked over straw and eaten with chives — the smoked family applied to something that has not been aged at all.
The sage was medicine before it was a garnish — and the spinach added with it is documented traditional practice, for colour and to cut the bitterness.
Triple-crème, and one of the ones people meet first — cream added to the milk, then a bloomy rind on top of it.
Small, lactic-set and sold at every stage from firm to spoonable in its own crock.
The ash-coated log, with a straw run through it lengthwise to hold it together.
A huge pressed cylinder that may only be made while the cows are on pasture — the season argument written into an appellation.
A hard cow's-milk cheese whose tradition traces to fifteenth-century Flemish settlers — mid-Atlantic, and Dutch by descent.
Keeps the fat and removes the water only — the opposite road to Parmigiano's, arriving at the same dryness.
A dried provolone-adjacent cheese; the smoked version, scamorza affumicata, is one of the few genuinely traditional smoked cheeses.
also Sap Sago
Skimmed-milk, pale green from blue melilot, grated rather than eaten in pieces — and its specification was fixed by public vote in 1463.
The ash-coated disc of the Loire cluster — same milk, same method, a different shape to name it by.
Alentejo's cardoon-set sheep cheese — the third of the Portuguese thistle cheeses.
Cardoon-set Bordaleira and Churra milk — and the cardoon ecotype measurably affects the cheese, which is terroir applied to the coagulant.
One of the regional cheeses that never leaves the country.
Balls rolled in za'atar and Aleppo pepper, then aged and dried — the spice crust as a rind, alongside Majorero's gofio and sürk's chilli.
Partly skimmed, and the protected one — its designation conserves a cattle breed, which is protection doing a job people rarely credit it with.
Feta stopped earlier — less acid, wetter, elastic — and the one brined cheese here that wants a thermophilic culture.
Sold as yogurt and made with cultures AND rennet — properly a fresh sour-milk cheese, and the mirror image of the brunost mistake.
also 蘇
A Nara-period reduced-milk solid recorded in court documents and reconstructed recently — concentration by heat, no coagulant. Reported, not verified.
The same sour-milk idea again, sharp and spreadable.
Made in a qualifying county, to the traditional method, from raw milk — so it is barred from the name by process, not by place.
Legally impossible to make in the village of Stilton, which is in the wrong county — and its PDO forbids raw milk, which is the half of the story that matters.
Bathed in perry made from the Stinking Bishop pear — which is named after a man. One of very few British cheeses in the B. linens tradition.
Genuinely the same family and the same physics as mozzarella, whatever else you think of it — the strings peel because the fibres are aligned.
Ripens the curd BEFORE stretching — stop at the ripened mass and you have imeruli instead. One vat, two national cheeses.
also Hatay sürkü
Cone-shaped drained yoghurt-curd rolled in chilli, thyme and cumin and dried — the spice crust is both the flavour and the rind.
The Swedish table cheese proper — mild, semi-hard, and rarely seen outside the country.
Square, milder than its smell suggests, and the most approachable entry to the washed rinds.
The pressed one of the brined family, so it slices where feta crumbles — and Telemea de Ibănești, Romania's first PDO, protects indigenous local COWS.
Curd pulled into threads finer than wool, stacked, soaked in cream and potted — a wedding cheese, and one I will simply admire rather than attempt.
Not sliced but shaved into rosettes — and saved by a kitchen gadget, the girolle patented by Nicolas Crevoisier in 1982.
Galician, mild, cow's milk, and shaped exactly as its name says.
Named for Tilsit in East Prussia, a town that is now Sovetsk in Russia — the cheese outlived the polity that named it. Cheese names are historical documents.
also Graukäse
Skimmed sour milk, acid-set, no rennet at all — a genuine pre-rennet survival, claimed by both Tyrols because the border moved and the cheese did not.
Mohant's firm alpine neighbour in the Slovenian mountains.
Cardoon-set raw sheep's milk, cloth-bound, and so soft inside that the serving method is to cut a lid off the top.
Grana Padano that opts out of both silage and lysozyme — a stricter name nested inside a looser one.
also Jibneh mshallaleh
String cheese soaked in brine for weeks and THEN braided — note the order.
also İzmir tulumu; Erzincan tulumu
Curd matured in a skin bag — and the correction the page makes on its own plan: kidskin OR cloth sacks, not "a whole goatskin".
The Hungarian quark, and the base of everything sweet.
The local whey cheese, made from the whey off the caș. Nothing is wasted here either.
The other Vacherin, and a fondue cheese rather than a spoon one — half of a moitié-moitié.
also Vacherin du Haut-Doubs
The winter cheese, made when there is too little milk for a big wheel and bound in a band of spruce bark that holds the collapsing paste together.
An ash-coated truncated pyramid — one of a cluster of Loire goat cheeses whose shapes exist mostly to tell them apart.
"Van herbed cheese" — wild herbs gathered on the mountains around Lake Van, so a flavoured cheese whose flavouring has a terroir of its own.
Hard, crystalline and intensely savoury — Europe's best-known trade-secret cheese. The distracted-dairymaid origin story is tradition, not record.
Part of the spine of the American artisan revival that began in the 1980s and is now three or four decades deep.
also Puant de Lille
Maroilles brined and held far longer than seems wise — the local name means "the stinker of Lille".
The Austrian arm of the alpine tradition, and excellent.
also Wagashi gassirè
Set with Calotropis procera — the Sodom apple — at 65 to 70 °C. A coagulant that works where every other one would be destroyed.
also Bierkäse
"White lacquer" cheese — heavily brined, no rind, and so salty and pungent that its second name tells you what to drink with it.
The family's cautionary tale: 176 producers in 1939, nine by 1946, and all of them had given up by 1954. It came back, but not by itself.
Commercially enormous, and mentioned because pretending it does not exist would be silly.
The protected form — because "cheddar" itself went generic centuries ago and the protection had to attach to something else.
A washed-rind descendant of Limburger by way of John Jossi, 1877 — and the reason a Detroit pizza has that caramelised edge.
One of the peninsula's hard pressed sheep cheeses, alongside Manchego, Roncal and Idiazabal.
Nothing matches that combination.
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