How to Taste Aged Cheeses
The Art of Tasting Cheese
- Sensorial observation
- Description of observed qualities
- Compare description with predetermined cheese standards
- Final assessment of cheese
Flavor and aroma test
- Odor: break apart a piece of cheese and hold it up to your nostrils, take a deep breath and evaluate the smell of the cheese in terms of quality, intensity and duration of the scent.
- Flavor: place ½ oz of the cheese to be tasted in your mouth; chew it in well to heat it up; roll it side to side and back and forth between your tongue and the roof of your mouth; and take note of the 4 fundamental flavors (sweet, salty, acidic and bitter).
- Aroma: swallow the cheese; close your mouth and inhale through your nose to define the aromas in terms of quality, intensity and duration.
- Structure: evaluate how the cheese holds up in your mouth. Is in hard, elastic sticky, crumbly?
Our video: How to test aged cheese
Characteristics of Cheese
Color: white, milk white, chalky white, ivory, pale hay, hay, rich hay, yellow, yellow gold.
Structure to the touch: sticky, compact, hard, elastic, fibrous, crumply.
Structure in the mouth: buttery, melting, finely granular, sticky.
Odor and flavor: intense, persistent, buttery, herbaceous, hay, floral, pasture, milk, barnyard, typical, well balanced, fragrant, flat, pungent.
Defects of Cheese
Color: brown or bicolore.
Structure: gummy, soft, sticky, chalky, sandy, grainy.
Flavor: week, unbalanced, fermented, metallic, flat, pungent, putrid, rancid, sulfurous, bitter, salty.
