How to taste cheeses? Second Step: touch
We started a journey to understand how to taste the cheeses properly. As we have already written in the article “How to taste cheese? First step:sight”, tasting cheeses means examining them through sight, touch, smell and taste. When approaching a cheese tasting you have to follow some useful tips for pleasant taste experience. After examining your cheeses through sight, the second step is the use of touch. In this phase we can understand many other things about cheese. But how do we proceed for a correct tactile and olfactory examination? Let’s find out together.
Use Tact to taste cheese
To taste cheese, touch is definitely not the most important sense. In fact, in many cases the visual examination is enough to determine if our cheese is creamy, soft or chewy. To taste cheese we have to use touch to determine the degree of hardness and elasticity.
How to taste cheeses: the hardness
The hardness is measured by analyzing the resistance that a cheese makes when, with the fingers, we try to push it. First of all, the rule is that the harder cheeses are the more seasoned. The hard cheese, however, should not be dry and rough, even the most seasoned (very few types of cheese are an exception). If a cheese has these characteristics it means that it has taken too much air due to an incorrect seasoning.
How to taste cheeses: the elasticity
The elasticity of the cheese is the ability to resume the initial shape after the pressure. From this we can understand something about the characteristics of the milk used.If a cheese is elastic, it means that the milk it was made with was little fat. If you taste a cheese and its dough is elastic and its color tends to pale yellow, it means that it have a higher percentage of cow’s milk. If instead it is not very elastic and with a candid color, it is probable that there is no cow’s milk or it will be present with a very low percentage.As we have seen from the last examples, to understand the characteristics of milk we used both sight and touch. When the picture is complete we will be able to combine all the senses in order to analyze our cheese and understand as much as possible about the product we taste.
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How to taste cheese in 8 rules
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