Everyone knows “goat cheese,” aka “fresh goat cheese” or “chèvre.” It’s white, it’s crumbly and northern California cooks made it famous in the ‘80s, atop beet salad. Good unaged goat cheese is a special and important thing. It should be moist and crumbly, without a hint of granularity. Its flavor should be clean and fresh, acidic (it makes your mouth water pleasantly) without being astringent, lemony while remaining milky and balanced. An unaged cheese gives you nothing to hide behind. Unfortunately there’s a lot of gluey, extruded goat cheese out there, metallic and sour, without any nuance.

Macaroni and cheese is a very important meal in my house. I’d like to tell you that’s because I regularly experiment with exotic combinations of cheeses, or because I’m constantly inventing new approaches to this crowd-pleaser. But the truth is that of the (perhaps hundreds of) pounds that get eaten each year at my place, the vast majority comes from a narrow little box and is handily taken down by my daughters. I was mildly horrified when, several months ago, my youngest announced, “Macaroni and cheese is my favorite food in the world.” It’s the only meal I consistently make from a package. I

I drink sparkling wine because it has the ability to make even a random Tuesday feel festive. With New Year’s just around the corner, take this opportunity to pursue a cheese line-up entirely driven by bubbly. Particularly if you’re considering entertaining a crowd, in which case you can create stations around your house (even in my smallest apartment I’d have a counter station, a dining table station and a coffee table station;

Cheese folk speak of the bloomy rind or soft-ripened cheese. Friends at a cocktail party fall back on the old familiar “Brie.” What binds these cheeses together is their downy, edible white rind. In cheese techni-speak, it’s called a bloomy rind (or sometimes a soft-ripened, or even a surface-ripened cheese). Brie-ish cheeses have a rind made of some combination of mold (Penicillium candidum, Penicillium camemberti) or mold and yeast or yeast-like fungus (Geotrichum candidum) that blooms like tiny flowers on the exterior of a ripening cheese. Over time, these patches of yellowish white fur are patted down to form a cohesive skin, or rind, on the cheese’s surface.

If I brought a soft, creamy cheese with a white rind to your house this weekend, you’d almost certainly hug me and say delightedly, “You brought Brie!!” And you might be right. But, then, if it’s me you might well be wrong because there are dozens, even hundreds, of Brie-like cheeses out there that are not actually Brie. The technical name for this style is bloomy rind, and over 80% of what’s sold in the U.S. is purchased between Halloween and New Year’s Eve. Forget “fall.” We’re entering Bloomy Rind Season.

Pairing bourbon (or any spirit) with cheese is tricky. The high alcohol content of liquor can overpower many cheeses; that burn demands a texture that can withstand the hit. This is the first reason I reach for aged cheeses 9 out of 10 times when I’m pairing with bourbon. Aged cheeses are firm to dry and texture. They have much less water than creamy cheeses like Brie. As a result, each crumble is all fat and protein and that absorbs the sting. There are other reasons to go aged. With time, cheeses like Cheddar, Swiss, and Parmesan develop toasty, nutty, woody and caramelly notes, all of which complement the basic flavor profile of bourbon. 

I have some cheese secrets and this is one: despite its being a “classic” dessert in the Northeast where I grew up, I’ve never had cheddar and apple pie. This is unlikely to surprise Southerners because cheese and pie isn’t a thing here. But up North, and in the Midwest, it’s THE thing that says “Welcome autumn.” You buy a pumpkin and a pot of chrysanthemums, you bake a pie (ideally with hand-picked apples from a nearby orchard) and you top the pie with a grating or thin slice of cheddar cheese. Some people even bake the cheese into, or just beneath, the top crust.‍

When I’m fielding questions about cheese—what to pair with, how to put together a great cheese board, which ones melt—I always try to remind people about the fresh cheeses. Fresh cheese is the simplest style with the least amount of age (hence the name). They are the bright white cheeses with no rind. They’re the highest in moisture, making them the most perishable. Mozzarella is probably the most famous.‍I make a plea for fresh cheeses because, while they’re unlikely contenders for your pre-dinner cheese plate, they’re mission critical for simple, delicious recipes. Fresh cheeses are found in nearly every cuisine around the world, from queso fresco in Mexico, Central and South American, to paneer in India and Southeast Asia. Here we have an international buffet of fresh cheese choices: Italian-inspired burrata, Greek feta (a fresh cheese that is pickled in salt water), French-looking chèvre (aka fresh goat cheese). We also have what I think of as the American fresh cheese choice: good old-fashioned cream cheese.

“Age only matters if you’re a cheese.”‍There’s something initially distressing about “fresh cheeses.” It suggests the alternative can only be un-fresh—old, compromised, dried out, maybe spoiled cheese. But in Cheeseland age matters. The passage of time is one of the defining influences on a cheese’s final flavor and texture so for a cheese to be called “fresh” merely refers to its lack of age.

If you’re anything like me, you grew up understanding Swiss cheese to be a plasticized block sliced at the deli counter alongside your mom’s quarter pound of ham. It had big holes. If you’re really like me, you kind of hated Swiss cheese because it had a sweet, oddly nutty flavor, like milk boiled too long in a pot. I campaigned for American or (exotica!) Provolone whenever possible. Having spent the last two weeks in Switzerland, Austria and southern Germany (Bavaria)

‍Gateway Cheese: Brie, Flavor Spectrum: Ranges from butter and cream on the approachable end to mushroom and cooked broccoli on the intense end. Textures: Soft, spreadable and buttery Approachable: A triple crème like Saint Andre, Saint Angel or Delice de Bourgogne Intense: St. Albans from Vermont Creamery

1. Gateway Cheese ®: Brie Why You Love It: Butter, spreadable, and rich, often with a hint of mushroomy flavor‍ Upgrade to: Fromager d’Affinois: The milk is filtered during cheesemaking to yield the silkiest most unbelievably creamy texture you can imagine. Anyone who appreciates butter will think you’re a genius.‍Humboldt Fog from Cypress Grove Chevre: Yes, it’s made of goat milk. But imagine a slab of moist, lemony cheesecake. Trust me.‍2. Gateway Cheese ®: Havarti Why You Love It: Simple, creamy, melts like a dream and doesn’t break the bank‍Upgrade to:Toma from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company: It’s got a rind and is aged a bit longer than Havarti so the texture is dense and fudgy, with aromas of warm butter and sweet, milky flavor. Plus, it’s made on a family farm in California.

Every Thanksgiving my enthusiastic offers to bring (fill in the blank: lard-crust pie; a mashed starch; a light, vitamin-rich vegetable thing) are quickly dismissed by my host(ess) who instructs me to select the cheese. I’ve picked cheese for upwards of fifty holiday and celebratory group gatherings, all of which I’ve attended, which means the selection has to be good. ‍I’ve learned that holidays are a time of restraint. When you’re contributing to a group meal it’s best to keep the group in mind, rather than indulge your momentary personal obsessions. In my case, that means checking the urge to bring 7 of the rankest, limpest cheeses I’ve recently discovered. It also means checking the urge to bring 7 of any kind of cheese, which is too many to precede a meal that, under many circumstances, reduces adults to sweatpant-swathed comatosity.

In my heart, I believe the #1 reason most everyone I have ever met loves cheese is because we all have a version of the same memory: tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. In my memory (and probably yours) the sandwich bread began as white but wound up golden brown. The cheese was orange and perfectly gooey when bitten into. It was a little bit sweet and a little bit salty and it practically dripped down my chin when I pulled my mouth away. There was no butter that I could see, but my fingertips were always slightly shiny when I put the sandwich down. That is the consummate American memory of a grilled cheese. My local diner made them. My college greasy spoon made them. My mom made them.

Many of the best known cheeses in the world—Cheddar, Parmigiano Reggiano, “Swiss” (aka Emmentaler) are firm to hard in texture. And yet, using these three as illustrations, they taste radically different. So, how do hard cheeses wind up this way—different from the limpid Bries, also different from one another?‍ Unlike most of the cheeses in the 101 groups discussed thus far, such as bloomy rinded Brie or washed rind Taleggio, the hard cheeses begin their journey as curds from which a far greater amount of moisture is removed. This can be achieved in several ways, including cutting of the curd (reducing a big floating mass into increasingly smaller bits), heating the curd (raising the temperature leads to a contraction of the curd and the accompanying expulsion of liquid whey), pressing the curd (applying pressure during cheesemaking and/or after the wheels are formed to squeeze out residual moisture) and, finally, salt which, in the form of brine or crystals can pull out remaining liquid inside the newly formed cheese.

When the time came for me to get married, no one was surprised when I planned the entire weekend by very detailed spreadsheet. In particular, I was obsessed with the food for the rehearsal pig roast, the cocktail hour, and the sit-down dinner that concluded with a cheese course before dessert.

Having grown up in the Pizza Capital of the United States (that would be New Haven, Connecticut) I have long-standing opinions on what makes a proper pizza. Chief among these are the default assumptions that pizza means “red pie” (tomato sauce) and that cheese on pizza means an evenly melted, gloriously stretchy, ever so slightly browned layer of molten goodness, ensuring milky, salty flavor with every bite, at least until you reach the crust.

These days, hyper local foods often get the most love. So this International Cheese Day I’m celebrating the best underappreciated cheeses of the entire world. Many of these are my refrigerator staples or Sunday afternoon go-tos, and all are readily available in supermarket specialty cheese departments and great independent stores:‍ Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog: Oh, ye haters of goat cheese—take a risk and try this. Snowy white, crumbly, and just the right amount of lemony, Humboldt Fog is a new American classic that converts more people to the “3rd milk of cheese” than any I know. That wavering blue line across the middle isn’t blue, it’s decorative vegetable ash with no discernible impact on flavor. Instead, enjoy moist, tangy, smearable goodness, best enjoyed with crisp, dry white wines.

Last week closed a US Open-worthy volley between the U.S. FDA and the international cheesemaking/cheeseloving community on the future of cheese in America. The world’s most famous cheeses, including Parmigiano Reggiano, Swiss Gruyere, English clothbound cheddar and more than 75% of the specialty cheeses produced in America were suddenly in peril. The reason? All of these cheeses are aged on wood boards. They have been sold and consumed in the States for decades, and the rapidly growing American artisan cheese industry has adopted many traditional practices while conforming to strict risk management standards per the Food Safety Modernization Act.

The key to a brilliant and memorable holiday cheese plate is a diverse selection of cheeses that are new to most guests, while remaining crowd friendly. There’s nothing celebratory about alienating Aunt Martha; at the same time, everyone’s game for a food celebration so break out of the Brie box (or wheel).

Our country is learning about cheese, and about the mind-boggling range of styles being made by cheesemakers across all fifty states. It’s still new to us. But if American cheese has a Steve Jobs equivalent—a mad scientist tinkering in the garage, fueled by a vision and passion way before its time, and, ultimately, producing a product that changes the way Americans experience life —then Mary Keehn is probably that person. Only, as she would undoubtedly point out, with way more elbow grease and way less money.

“This is where the Prairie meets the Big Woods. Back in the 1800s a squirrel could run from here to the East Coast without touching the ground (if he could get across the Mississippi River).” So says Jeff Jirik, as I sit huddled outside the Caves of Faribault, watching a mid November snowstorm flutter down on the Minnesota sandstone cliffs.

I was a mere year into my fledgling cheese career when a chef-client made me understand the difference between Parmigiano-Reggiano and Parmesan. I’d learned there were significant technical distinctions between the two cheeses, enough so that most Italians became apoplectic when Americans discussed them interchangeably.

I’ve written before about the assumed biases that I, as a “cheese person,” am often saddled with. People immediately think that knowing and writing and caring about cheese means I only like “fancy” (read: expensive/imported/rarified) cheeses. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cheese first spoke to my nerdy, academic side when I realized that it was a living cultural artifact. Each cheese is the product of a specific time, place, geography and unique set of constraints. Each cheese has an origin story and when you learn why a cheese is the way it is

Inasmuch as America’s history begins in the northeastern colonies, so does its cheese history. As 17th century English cheesemaking technologies and transportation systems evolved, a Westward migration of Cheddar-type cheeses continued across the Atlantic to the American colonies. The settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony came from the dairying regions of East Anglia, which was the original supplier of cheese and butter to London’s growing urban market and with them came a deep knowledge of, and interest in, dairying and cheesemaking. The Puritans kept careful tabs on advancements in English cheesemaking and adopted these for their own recipes.

I want to delve a bit more into cheese making fundamentals, and how four simple ingredients (milk, cultures, rennet/coagulant, salt) can produce a seemingly infinite number of cheeses.‍ After my article on Hard Cheeses, many people wrote in wanting to know where Cheese X, Y or Z (Pecorino, Asiago, and Manchego to name a few) fit into my broad strokes overview. I thought a further contextualization of cheese making would help. For those of you who want to supergeek-out I heartily recommend Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which has, among many things, a brilliant flow chart encapsulating cheese making.

One of the things I love most about the world of cheese is that it’s jam-packed with recipes and styles that evolved in very specific historical and cultural contexts. Swiss-style cheeses, for example, taste sweeter than Cheddars in part because salt was a precious commodity that couldn’t be easily transported into the Alpine mountains were this style was invented. Instead, the curd was cooked during the cheese making process to expel moisture; the by-product of little salt and long cooking is a concentrated, sweet, nutty flavor.

Over 15 years ago, as a starry-eyed kid just moved to New York City, I stumbled into love with cheese. I was much less sophisticated than millennials are today but I fell hard for this new food that stirred something deep within me. So much so that I scrapped my Ivy League trimmings and went to work for peanuts on a little cheese counter in the West Village.

One of things I love about cheese is that there’s often a practical reason why a certain cheese is the way it is. Different recipes have evolved over thousands of years in specific geographic and cultural conditions and while those conditions may not exist in today’s modern cheesemaking world, each piece of cheese has one foot firmly anchored in the past.

When people find out I’m “in the cheese business” one of the first questions they ask is, “Oh so are you a cheesemaker?” Or, “Do you want to have your own farm someday?” To which I speedily and unequivocally answer, “No.” Or, more likely, “Hell, no. Not in a million years would I EVER be a cheesemaker.” 

Pairing is hard. All flavors are subjective, but when you put two elements together, intending to create an elusive third flavor experience, the possible variations pile up. When I was first teaching cheese I learned wine pairing at the side of Josh Wesson, founder of the brilliant Best Cellars.

If I had a top ten list of cheeses everyone should know about, Halloumi would probably be number one. Maybe a few folks have heard of or eaten it, but its insanely crowd-pleasing flavor and novel, non-melting texture make it something that should be part of every cookout. Halloumi offers the added bonus of accommodating vegetarians who aren’t going to for a burger or dog, or it can be quickly served up as a salty, savory first course for everyone. So what is it?

Context: In order to melt cohesively (no clumping or separating) cheese fondue must contain 3 components: cheese, acid and starch. Acid typically comes in the form of dry white wine but fondue can be made with beer or apple cider or sweet wine with lemon juice added for necessary acidity.

August tomatoes have me thinking about my first days in cheese, when imported exotic mozzarella di bufala was novel on the counter, and few customers had heard of the spun-cream sacks called burrata. Either was perfectly suited to a family style first course, the entire wobbly ball plopped down on a platter, surrounded by tiny yellow cherry tomatoes and zaggy striped Green Zebras.

One of the questions I’m most frequently asked is “What cheese do you have at home?” The honest answer is that it’s rarely the newest, weirdest offering. Most of the time, what I eat regularly is my greatest hits list. These are the cheeses I’m most likely to recommend when cheese explorers ask for an upgrade on their old reliables. In short, this is the list no one should do without:

A few years after I started working in cheese my phone rang. On the other end, somewhat confused, was my mother. “I bought that cheese you said you like. E-poss-ay? I think something’s wrong with it. It stinks. How do I scrape off all the orange slime?” It’s a testament to my mother that she didn’t just toss it. For me, it was a reminder of how bizarre, to burgeoning cheese explorers, this type of cheese really is.

Being from the Northeast I spent many years laboring under the mistaken notion that dairying, and cheesemaking, was an exclusively East Coast to Midwest thing. Getting into cheese in the 2000s, the idea of California dairying was massive confinement operations milking cows to death in a short two years, and the small, upstart artisanal cheesemakers defining themselves in opposition to that grim trend.

The recent furor over The E.U.’s proposal that U.S. foodmakers be restricted from using names with historical ties to Europe has me thinking. As a twelve-year veteran of the specialty cheese industry, my kneejerk sympathies (dare I say it) have lain across the pond. For decades, the countries that now comprise the European Union have been regulating and protecting their most unique foodstuffs

As a guest host of Saturday Night Live, Kevin Hart completed the trio of “Bushwick Boys” whose 4-minute corner chat about changing neighborhood dynamics included, among other things, gluten-free muffins, $8 artisanal mayonnaise and cheese and wine pairings. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor.