How do you eat Shelburne Farms cheddar? Do you cut it up straight from the fridge? Maybe serve it on crackers? We hope you savor your snack, but do you ever slowly explore the many flavors in cheddar–its full “profile”?
When you’re part of the cheese team at Shelburne Farms, you do! To determine how our cheddars are developing, we explore the full sensory realm.
First the cheese team takes a core sample or “plug” from one of our 40-lbs aged blocks using a cheese trier or cheese iron.
Once the plug comes to room temperature, it’s cut into small bite-sized disks for each member. However, the cheese loses some of its volatile and dynamic aroma esters as it sits exposed to oxygen, so each team member breaks their disk in half to expose fresh cheese, then holds it close to their noses for a good whiff.
Next, we place the small piece in our mouth and squish it between our tongue and the roof of our mouth to coat our palate. From the sensory receptors on our tongues, we’ll pick up on the salty, acidic, bitter, or umami flavors that are common in cheddar cheese.
The process is actually pretty clinical and laborious, but here are the take-aways for you.
1. Let your cheese come to room temperature
As the fat in cheese comes to room temperature, it releases its volatile aromas, which maximize the flavors you can detect.
2. Taste slowly from start to finish
Like wines, all cheeses have a flavor profile. This includes all the different taste sensations that you detect as you eat it—both long and short flavors. Short flavors pop up then quickly vanish. Long flavors last for half or more of the flavor profile. See if you can detect both. Also, don’t forget about aftertaste—the lingering flavor that may appear after you’ve swallowed the cheese.
3. Nose first, mouth second
Our olfactory lobe (nose!) and our tongue define the “flavor” of almost everything we eat. The tongue is the receptor of the different flavor groups: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami. But those flavors can be kind of one note. Sure, sweet is sweet and salty is salty but what is the context in which those flavors emerge? A lot of taste is using your experiences with other foods and aromas to describe what you’re encountering in the cheese.
4. Think beyond “sharp”
A common response to eating cheddar is, “it’s sharp.” But what is “sharp,” exactly? It's become a catch-all term for a lot of sensations we encounter in cheese, but sharp is not universally defined. Is it a strong flavor? Acidic? Bitter? For us, “sharp” is where a noticeably acidic flavor begins to become more prominent. In our 1-year cheddar, this occurs as one of the last sensations when you eat it. In our 2-year, the acidity comes at the beginning.
Putting it all together
Let’s take our 1-year cheddar. Typically, it starts with flavors of salted buttered popcorn, followed by an uptick in acid. That flavor shift can take you a bit by surprise! And no, there’s no buttered popcorn in our cheddar, but I’m relying on my experience with other foods to describe some of the flavors I’m encountering.
Once you start tuning into all your senses, the flavors you detect can get pretty wild–and wide. The folks that make Comté, an alpine cheese made in France, found 83 distinct flavors for their cheese, as identified by Comté’s 160 different cheesemakers and 16 affineurs. The flavors range from the expected: milk, butter, cream; to the descriptive (though not necessarily edible): almond, lemon, honey; fresh cut grass, potato, mushroom; to the unexpected: wet wool, leather, and, my personal favorite, rancid walnut. Again, none of those flavors are in the cheese, but it's what the cheese evokes on the tongue and nose.
Shelburne Farms Cheddar Profiles
As someone who has eaten a fair amount of Shelburne Farms cheddar over the years, here are some common flavors that have been evoked from our various styles of cheese.
- 6-month: butter, salt, grass, macadamia nut
- 1-year: salted buttered popcorn, bread, toasted peanuts, cream cheese
- 2-year: lemon, flinty wet rocks, sulfur, onion
- 3-year: pineapple, rosemary, pepper, nutmeg
- Clothbound: mushroom, beef broth, soil, grapefruit pith
- Tractor: chicory, citric acid, grapefruit pith, wet hay
Hopefully these starting points will open your mind to engaging with cheese with all your senses.
