THE BATTLE OF THE CHEESE

World Cheese Awards 2024, Viseu, Portugal:

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In THE BATTLE OF THE CHARCUTERIE, cheese won, with ham and salami coming next in the poll. I'm not surprised cheese won this latest battle as it also won THE BATTLE OF COLD FINGER FOODS. Perhaps it was a poll too far?

Fittingly and even cheesily, it's now the turn of cheese to do battle. There's no way I can do a poll on different types of cheese. There are about 2,000 different cheeses produced across the world. The British Cheese Board, now defunct, claimed that Britain produces about 700 distinct cheeses. France and Italy each produce about 400 hundred different cheeses, though some figures suggest that France produces up to 1,600 different cheeses. Charles de Gaulle, a former French President, once asked, "How can you govern a country in which there are 246 kinds of cheese?" Cheese is far from being a European thing because America is by far the biggest cheese-producing country in the world. Take a bow Wisconsin as the cheese state of America!

Most cheese is very local where it's made and often doesn't travel well. Consequently there are far too many types of cheese in the world to conduct a meaningful poll. Instead this poll will focus on different kinds of cheese, whether made from buffalo, camel, cow, donkey, goat, pig, sheep, reindeer or whatever mammal's milk, plus vegan 'milk'.

Because of the large number of different types of cow milk cheeses, I've divided them into hard and soft cheeses.

Many cheeses can be made from cow, goat or sheep or whatever milk. For example, Ricotta is an Italian soft cheese that can be made from buffalo, cow, goat, and sheep milk. Feta, a Greek cheese, is usually made from sheep milk but it's sometimes made from a mixture of sheep and goat milk. Mozzarella, essential for pizzas, is a soft Italian cheese made from buffalo milk but it can also be made from cow milk.

In addition, I've included blue cheese, brined cheese, cooked pressed cheese, cream cheese, fresh cheese, processed cheese, smoked cheese, washed-rind cheese and yogurt cheese as poll options. Adding these poll options means that my poll options aren't mutually exclusive categories, generally a no-no for pollsters.

Blue cheeses are made by injecting a penicillium fungus into them. These cheeses are blue-veined and are smelly, sometimes very smelly! Brined cheeses are cheeses matured in brine. Cooked pressed cheeses, sometimes known as Alpine cheeses, are Swiss-style cheeses in which, as its name suggests, there is a cooking and a pressing process involved in the making of these usually hard cheeses with an elastic texture. Cream cheeses are soft, white and mild-tasting cheeses made from a mix of milk and cream. Fresh cheeses are simple soft cheeses made from milk that is just drained and curdled with little other processing; these usually soft cheeses have a very limited shelf-life. Processed cheeses are cheeses made with an emulsifying agent to give them a longer shelf-life. Smoked cheeses are, surprise surprise, smoked, though are often processed before being smoked; many cheeses like Cheddar, Gouda, Gruyère and Provolone can be smoked. Washed-rind cheeses are usually soft cheeses cured, often by adding alcohol or spices, in such a way that a rind appears around the cheese. And yogurt cheeses, sometimes called labneh, unsurprisingly are made from yogurt and some would argue that they're not strictly cheese; labneh is very popular in the Middle East.

But adding these nine kinds of cheese to the poll means there's some overlap between the poll options. For example, Comté, Emmental and Gruyère are cooked pressed cheeses made from cow milk; Grana Padano and Parmesan are cow milk hard cheeses that are both cooked and pressed; Feta is a brined cheese and also a sheep milk cheese; Roquefort. is a blue cheese but is also a hard cheese made from sheep milk; Appenzeller and Limburger are both washed-rind cheeses but the former is a cow milk hard cheese and the latter is a cow milk soft cheese.

I hope you can now understand the problems I had in designing this poll, and I haven't even addressed the issue of those cheeses impregnated or infused with stuff like black pepper, chives, cranberries, garlic, port, sage, walnuts and even salami. This has been by far the most difficult poll for me to do. Sometimes an imperfect poll is better than a perfect poll; dirty is better than clean!

But to help people navigate this slightly methodologically flawed poll with overlapping options, I've given examples of the types of cheese for each kind of cheese listed as a poll option.

Both my grandfathers made cheese, Cheshire cheese on their dairy farm. Strangely most Cheshire cheese isn't made in the English county of Cheshire but in its neighbouring county of Shropshire. I can attest that making cheese is a very smelly business; every room of my grandparents' homes reeked of cheese. I can only imagine what Wisconsin homes smell like. No wonder @YourSassyPussy doesn't like visitors!

Despite being a smelly business, cheese is also a lucrative business. Recently, there was a theft of 24 tons of Cheddar cheese, worth about £310,00 (about $390,000), from London's Neal's Yard Dairy. Clearly cheese crime pays!

My favourite kinds of cheese are cow milk soft cheese and smoked cheese, with cow milk hard cheese being my most favourite kind of cheese to eat.

Vignotte cheese, a cow milk soft cheese made in Normandy, France:

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My least favourite kinds of cheese are goat milk and sheep milk cheese, with blue cheese being the worst kind of cheese to eat. All have an unpleasant whiff and therefore taste - the nose and tongue work closely together. Most cheese is whiffy but blue cheeses are particularly whiffy and even pongy. I can handle smelly cheeses in a soup and a sauce but not on a biscuit nor in a salad.

Despite the name of Stinking Bishop, a cow milk soft cheese, another cow milk soft cheese, Époisses is arguably the stinkiest cheese in the world.

There are a lot of cheeses I haven't eaten, but those I haven't eaten I'm not tempted to eat. Cat, dog, horse and pig milk cheeses aren't tempting, Donkey milk cheese also isn't tempting even if it's claimed that Pule, a Serbian donkey milk cheese and reportedly the world's most expensive cheese, enhances a man's virility. And a cheese made from a woman's breast milk doesn't appeal - I wouldn't eat a City Funk, Sweet Air Equity and Wisconsin Bang cheese if on a restaurant's cheeseboard. (I'm now wondering whether @YourSassyPussy is involved in the making of Wisconsin Bang!)

The World Cheese Awards recently took place in Portuguese city of Viseu. Much to the delight of the locals, a Portuguese sheep milk cheese, Queijo de Ovelha Amanteigado, was crowned World Champion Cheese 2024. An Australian cheese made from goat milk and green ants won a Super Gold Medal at the World Cheese Awards of 2017 and 2022. No way in a month of Sundays am I eating that cheese!

What are your most and least favourite kinds of cheese?
How much cheese do you eat? And how do you eat your cheese?
What are your favourite cheeses to eat?

I eat a lot of cheese, whether on its own with biscuits or crackers, as a sauce, as a pizza base topping, in a soup, or grilled on toast. Cheese on toast, Welsh rarebit if you want to get fancy, is one of my favourite late night snacks. I've found that cheese on toast always tastes better when someone else makes it!

Though I use Cheddar cheese when cooking, I prefer the more crumbly cow milk hard white cheeses like Cheshire, Lancashire and Wensleydale cheese to eat on its own. Regarding soft cheeses, I'm partial to Brie and Camembert. Baked Camembert, especially served with cranberry sauce, is divine. I'm also partial to fried Halloumi cheese. But my all-time favourite cheese to eat is a cow milk soft cheese, Vignotte. This French cheese is creamy and crumbly, perfect in my book.

Below is a poll where you can anonymously select your most favourite kind of cheese. Unfortunately only one pick is allowed in the poll.

A poll on this site can only have 20 answer options. Unfortunately there was no room in the poll for: alpaca milk cheese, cat milk cheese, deer milk cheese, dog milk cheese, elk milk cheese, giraffe milk cheese, granular cheese, horse milk cheese, llama milk cheese, moose milk cheese, stretched curd cheese, whey cheese, wildebeest milk cheese, woman's breast milk cheese, and yak milk cheese.

I think cow milk hard cheese will win the poll, with brined cheese, buffalo milk cheese, cow milk soft cheese and sheep milk cheese tailing behind. But smoked cheese may be a dark horse!

Please see the first comment below to see what has won each battle of the food and drinks so far.

Kris Lloyd Artisan Anthill cheese:

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