Say cheese

[simont]

Is it just me, or does cheese taste noticeably better when you have previously grated part of the block and are now eating the part with the grated-from surface?

My guess is that (if I'm not just imagining it) it's a surface-area thing. If so, I wonder if there's a market for weird specialist cheese knives that leave a highly uneven surface every time they cut.

Comments

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

Clearly this requires some sort of blinded taste-testing in order to validate it. How one might blind the tester(s) to the texture of rough-cut cheese is left as an exercise for the reader...

[simont]

Yes, I was wondering that. It is a tricky one, no question.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Grated vs. normally cut? I prefer grated most of the time :)

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

How foods taste to you will be rather different, because taste is usually strongly connected with smell. So the market for your fractal cheese knife may be anosmics-only.

(S)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

weird specialist cheese knives that leave a highly uneven surface every time they cut.

You could eat the grated cheese, which has a really high surface area?

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

If I were going to test it, I'd dye the cheese different colours (with tasteless odourless dye) and try each colour in both plain and wiggly, announcing it as a trial of the effects of the colouring. Or just use different varieties, and downplay the effect of the cutting, though this would probably need a bigger sample :)

In another respect, if one is trying to sell specially rough knives, it doesn't matter if the effect is placebo or not.

[gerald_duck]

I see two conjectures: one is that the increased surface area plays better on the tongue, another is that the cheese ages better with a rough surface. The latter can be tested by eating from the grated surface immediately and comparing with eating from a surface that was grated the day before.

I think the issue is increased surface area. In the same way, Marabou sells chocolate in tubes where each piece has a large concave dimple in the top. True, it also reduces the packing efficiency of the chocolate and lets them sell a smaller mass of chocolate in the same volume, but that dimple does improve the flavour. I know from personal experience that putting two thin slices of cheese on a cracker side by side instead of one slice twice as thick in the middle improves flavour. Similarly, devices for making wafer-thin slices of cheese are popular in Scandinavian countries (and, interestingly, in the Cambridge Cheese Shop for giving people samples of cheese).


Another point is that cheese tastes better when left to stand out of the 'fridge for half an hour or so.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The grated part is slightly oxidised and the larger the surface area, the more oxidised goodness you get.

[firefliesinjune.livejournal.com]

By that logic, wouldn't the grated cheese be the best tasting cheese of all?

[firefliesinjune.livejournal.com]

Couldn't you just blindfold yourself so you don't know what kind of cheese you're getting? :)

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

grated cheese is awesome.

[firefliesinjune.livejournal.com]

This whole thread is making me want a giant of plate of spaghetti with fresh grated parmesan.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Any particular type of cheese?

I feel compelled to share the pain

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

My father did the shopping last week, because my mother and I were in Austria.

Said mother is insisting that we finish off the Tesco Value Mild White Cheddar before starting anything nicer.

*whimper*

I grumbled about this quite... pointedly, to which my father replied that we'd needed cheese so he'd got cheese and anyway nobody ate cheddar as cheese in its own right. To which I said a) it's not cheese; it's tile grout, and b) yes. Yes they did. ... he proceeded to sulk at me.

(I mention this because you're making me crave cheese, but, um, see aforementioned issue...)