Cheese Expert Guesses Cheap vs Expensive Cheeses | Price Points | Epicurious

I'm Liz Thorpe and I'm a cheese expert it's like really intense hard cheeses right off the bat what I'm seeing is that this cheese is very aged I can tell because it's kind of brown yellowy dark in color and it's got these little white patches in it which happens as cheese ages around a year they will get these little protein crystals in them that make them kind of crunchy also important is the rind so it's got this dark crusty exterior that means it's been aged out in the open air I'm thinking this is maybe an aged Gouda or like a really aged parmigiano-reggiano this cheese doesn't have the dark color doesn't have the little crunchy white crystals and it doesn't really have a rind it's the same all the way around I'm thinking it's definitely younger and I'm guessing it's probably like a Parmesan style I'm gonna have to taste to find out this cheese smells really concentrated and really intense it's like a waxy like biting into a crayon with little salt or sugar crystals in it and this is definitely parmigiano-reggiano this one is totally different it's firm but it's creamy and it's almost sweet kind of like cheese candy my guess is that this is Parmesan versus parmigiano-reggiano I'm guessing a is the more expensive one yeah about twice as expensive so why would parmigiano-reggiano be twice as expensive as american-made parmesan parmigiano-reggiano is a regulated cheese for example it can only be made in a few regions around Reggio Emilia and northern Italy it has to be made of raw or unpasteurized cow's milk and it has to be aged for a minimum of 18 months in open-air aging rooms it's turned its flipped it's brushed by hand and by weird robot machines that are really cool American parmesan on the other hand doesn't have any aging restrictions and it's actually aged in plastic I often go for parmesan just because it's mixed in with a lot of other stuff and I personally don't notice the difference as much but if I'm using parm on top of something like a salad where I really get the flavor of the cheese I always use parmigiano-reggiano when it's front and center you really really want to taste the cheese so right off the bat this one is definitely a fresh goat cheese what that means is it's bright white goat milk is always whiter than cow milk or sheep milk and I can tell it's a fresh cheese because it has no rind on the outside it's young probably been made in the last couple of days or the last couple of weeks this one on the other hand has this weird brainy looking rind on the outside so it doesn't look like a Brie but it's definitely got a molded or yeasty rind like a Brie definitely this one is more labor intensive I'm gonna start with a see it's totally different it doesn't really smell like anything which is actually a good thing you don't want fresh cheese to smell definitely fresh goat cheese it's like cream cheese but tangy lemony it's like sticking to my mouth I can barely talk um bee I'm not so short we're gonna have to cut it open this is an aged goat cheese kind of like a brie style definitely stronger smells kind of nutty I'm gonna guess this is about four to eight weeks old because it's gonna take that much time to grow this style of rind on the outside of the cheese cheese like this could have been made by hand but it also could have been made by a machine if you think about little goat logs you buy in the supermarket they go right into their plastic wrapping okay I'm going with bee bee it's definitely in the more expensive cheese okay it was a lot more expensive that was right all that work makes this cheese five times more expensive and it's the reason why you generally cook with this style of cheese but you sit around with your friends and eat the style of jeez this one is really hard because these really look very much the same what I can tell is that they're the same style of cheese like what are called cooked pressed cheeses cheese people call it an Alpine style of cheese made in the mountains I can tell that because they're are not voiced and creamy they're firm they're both aged they both have little white specks so they're probably about the same age probably about ten months and they have a similar rind the rind is a little bit orange I will say one of the only visual differences between these two is that this cheese is darker yellow that's usually a sign of grass-fed cows milk so cows that are eating only grass their milk is actually a deeper yellow color from the beta carotene in the grass and it comes through the milk and you can see it in the cheese I think I need to taste them I'm gonna start with a so it smells like cooked milk like if you boil milk on the stove and roasted nuts and oniony smells like caramelized onions those are all Swiss cheese Alpine cheese smells I'm not there yet but definitely we're we're in the mountains somewhere I may be grasping at straws here but I'm guessing this is grass-fed cows milk which might might mean something this one is much more complex it's got lots of fruity flavors um it's very very tender and texture it's a beautiful texture it's like dough I think this is Greer Swiss Greer which is a very famous cow's milk cheese from the mountains but I am going to guess that this is the more expensive one because I think it's grass-fed cows milk and it just tastes amazing I'm going B B is my guess all right I do know my stuff no just kidding so this is a Swiss cheese this is definitely Gruyere and then this is a cheese that is made by a single farm this is ultimately the vote with your dollars choice because this producer has chosen to make a cheese from exclusively grass-fed milk and it is very very expensive to do that over in Switzerland and in most of the EU there are a lot of government subsidies that support traditional food making so why buy one over the other you can use them for the same thing they're both really delicious but here I would say you spend more money because you're voting with your dollars and supporting this type of food production in America is really really important okay I love this comparison because pretty much anyone would look at these and say oh it's feta cheese but I'll tell you what I see right off the bat two things this one is really wet it's been packaged in brine in salt water this one's kind of dry and crumbly looking and then the other thing I see is that this one is really really smooth and this one is kind of rough looking so I actually think that this one is made with a different type of milk so this is the dryer looking one it wasn't as wet and it's kind of crummy this one the wetter one is much like smoother and creamier that's our milk difference I think it's super salty but like all I taste is salt it's like salty crumbs this one this one smells like olives like black olives and it tastes totally different okay so here's what I think is going on I definitely think that this is the more expensive one real feta real sheep real goat milk cost more i think am i right yes so the main reason Greek feta traditional feta is going to be more expensive is actually because in the milk so it's made with sheep milk and goat milk it has to be by Greek law that's how you have to do it American made feta can be made with any kind of milk and in this case it's made with cow's milk so small sheep make very rich milk but they don't make a lot of it and it's expensive it takes considerably more sheep milk to make the same amount of cheese but the difference in price isn't that huge with feta and so if there's a time to really splurge and spend the extra couple of bucks this would be it so here come the blue cheese's the difference between these two cheese's is going to be sort of the culmination of all of the differences that we've seen throughout all the styles of cheese right off the bat I'm noticing some age differences between these two blues so this one is lighter in color and you can see it's more crumbly and texture the second thing you can actually see in the top of the wheel these little holes and that is how a blue cheese gets blue the cheese maker adds mold to the milk during cheese making but in order to make the mold grow you have to get air into the cheese and you do that by poking holes in the cheese this one is sort of smoother and Dunster I'm thinking this one has been aged longer it's sort of had time to like meld together a little bit more it's sort of more marbled and less concentrated so I'm thinking this one might have been pierced by hand this one pierced by machine that's gonna make a big difference and then of course this one is obviously wrapped in some kind of leaf and I know of two blue in the world that are wrapped in leaves I'm thinking there's something special going on with this cheese I'm gonna taste them and find out let's see this is like classic blue cheese dressing I need a wedge salad um this is a really good kind of standard American style blue cheese this one and you can see it's it's creamier it doesn't fall apart in the same way it has this really strong fruity smell it's just not all about salt and spice the way that that typical blue cheese flavor is so that's kind of confirming my suspicions about cheese B I am definitely thinking cheese B is the more expensive cheese and I think it is a singular cheese that's made only by one farmer in the whole world that's my guess so let me reveal yeah it's also one of the most expensive cheese's I know so what makes it a forty or I've even seen it be a fifty plus dollar a pound cheese versus like a fifteen or sixteen dollar a pound cheese that's pretty much all the stuff I talked about it's aging it's the fact that this is I'm guessing a really well-made but pretty machine-made cheese versus a very handmade cheese and it has to do with this leaf rapping this is the it's New Years it's Christmas I'm gonna splurge on something that I can only get once a year this is that cheese so it's Tuesday night versus special party cheese and that is what we're looking at so you can see that there's tons of choices and cheese might seem expensive but there are reasons behind that and I hope that you have a little bit more information so that now when you go out to buy cheese you can decide what is the best cheese for you that day you

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 6,849,937

Rating: 4.8268871 out of 5

Keywords: cheese, cheese expert, parmesan cheese, goat cheese, gruyere cheese, feta cheese, cheeses, blue cheese, cheap vs expensive, expensive cheese, cheap cheese, cheap cheeses, expensive cheeses, cheap vs expensive food, cheese test, cheese tasting, cheese taste, cheese making process, cheese taste test, how to make cheese, taste test, price points, cheese reviews, cheese comparison, cheese review, cheese testing, cheese price, epicurious, cooking, recipes

Id: lR-oJvKJyUY

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/MorrisM]

She reminded me of Steve1989MREinfo but without "nice hiss" and "alright":

"- This is the oldest I've tasted so far, let's try it"

[u/ask_away_utk]

It bothers me more than it should that they didn't use the same price per unit on the goats cheese. One is $/4oz and the other is $/6oz which makes the direct comparison a little more confusing so it its actually less than 4x as expensive instead of the 5x she mentions in the video.

[u/asr]

She's so pleased every time she gets it's right, it's really cute :)

[u/nikolatesla86]

All the cheese and milk talk reminds me of Napoleon Dynamite when he is taste testing the milks and notices the cow got into an onion patch.

[u/grendelt]

...so what's the name of that leaf-wrapped blue cheese at the end?

[u/Skomarz]

What I took from this: If it looks older, it's more expensive.

[u/MacStylee]

So the greek feta is more expensive and not as tasty as the US one made with cow's milk?

Did I misunderstand that?

[u/Jay_bo]

I am not a cheese expert, but looking at them for a second I got all but the feta right.

[u/carbonclasssix]

I liked that she used a different knife for each type. It makes sense, but I had never seen that much variety.