Caring For Your Cheese

Caring for your Cheese

Follow these simple steps to help you get the best from your cheese.

Where to keep it
Many artisan cheeses are matured and stored in cellars and caves but for most of us this isn’t a possibility. The most convenient way to get the best out of your cheeses is to store them in the fridge, preferably in the vegetable drawers where the humidity is likely to be higher and a bit more to their liking.

How to keep it
Humidity is important with cheese, left open the cheese will most likely become too dry, but if wrapped in plastic film will likely become soggy and smelly. Once you have opened your cheese try to keep it wrapped in the original packaging as this will help maintain its condition, if this is not possible you could use parchment/greaseproof paper or beeswax wraps as an alternative.

How to prepare it
We recommend that to get the best flavour from your cheese you take it out of the fridge roughly 2 hours before you intend to serve it to make sure that it is at room temperature.

Use by & Best Before Dates
Some cheeses will have a use by date, usually the softer or fresher cheeses, this in short is the date at which point after the food item should not be consumed for health and safety reasons.

Best Before is more commonly seen on harder cheeses and is related to the point the food item is deemed to have reached its best, this is not to say that after this point the food is any less safe or that it is inedible, in fact with many cheeses the flavours will continue to develop.

A straight forward way to look at it is that the manufacturer or retailer believes that at this date, or just before, the item is at its best flavour.