When I used to work behind a cheese counter, I could count on a variety of cheese knives to get the cutting done: huge, double-handled cleavers, large chef knives, and slender, sharp slicers. For the most part, it's not a problem if you don't personally own tons of different knives; once you get smaller portions of cheese home, you can use a pretty standard knife on nearly anything. But there's one professional cheese cutting tool that sometimes I wish I had: A cheese wire, best used for soft, gooey cheese and crumbly goats. Luckily, there's an easy way to emulate its function, with something you already have at home.
At cheese shops, cheesemongers will use cheese wires or fancy cheese harps to cut soft and crumbly cheeses neatly. But when at home, use dental floss on delicate cheeses!
Typically, the fate of a soft cheese is sealed: it's nearly always smothered or smushed on a cracker or a piece of bread. But when spreading isn't your goal, and you crave clean, sleek cuts for salads, individual cheese plates, or a neat appetizer bite, dental floss is your friend. (You can also use dental floss to neatly slice your cake layers in half crosswise!)
If the cheese is small, you can hold it in one hand while your other pulls the floss taught and does the cutting. For larger situations, place cheese on a surface, shimmy the floss beneath it, and simply slice up, holding both ends of the floss and crossing the two ends to complete the cut. Then repeat in equal intervals.
This trick is especially great if you need the cheese to stay intact, as is the case for breading and frying goat cheese rounds. Dental floss works well on sticky cheeses, too, since there's nothing to which the cheese can attach itself. It just kind of glides through, leaving a nicely cut edge behind. Floss acts almost like those cheese knives with holes going down the blade itself, meant to decrease not only the surface area of the knife but also the amount of cheese that would potentially sacrificed on the blade.
So while it's not cool — though perhaps your dentist would disagree — dental floss can come in handy for your cheese service: before, during, and come to think of it, afterwards, too.
Nora Singley used to be a cheesemonger and the Director of Education at Murray's Cheese Shop. Until recently she was a TV Chef on The Martha Stewart Show. She is currently a freelance food stylist and recipe developer in New York.
Related: How Much Cheese Per Person Should I Serve?
(Image: Bake-Aholic, used with permission from the author.)
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Probably just don't use the mint and cinnamon flavors, right? :)
My dentist only gives me those flavored ones, so as much as I would like to try this, I can't really until I actually buy floss...
If we're feeling like we shouldn't be wasteful I'd think there would be some kind of sanitizable metal wire that would do the same, no?
Works great for cutting cinnamon rolls off the roll, too!
This also works well for cinnamon rolls.
Now that is what I want to try: cutting cinnamon rolls with dental floss.
This is also great for cutting polenta.
@Emmi--you could also try cutting with a guitar string or placing small sections of goat cheese in an egg slicer
Alton Brown says you can use it to tie meat for cooking
Yeah, my mom always used to do this to cut cinnamon rolls. She just used thread, worked fine.
I prefer the waxed floss for cheese-cutting duties, but if it's going in the oven (ie. tying up a roast), probably best to use unwaxed.
And the "flavored" flosses are good for nothing. Not even flossing. Yuck!
I also discovered one day that it's useful when improvising a pastry piping bag out of plastic wrap because you've only JUST discovered that you've run out of sandwich bags.
Slicing cheesecakes, any delicate pastry, including croissants! They don't seem to crumble as much as with a knife. Yep-- dental floss is at least as useful in the kitchen as in the bathroom.
And during parties, you don't even have to excuse yourself from the kitchen to get that bit of smoked salmon out from between your front teeth ;)
I am going to do this from now on with mozzarella, which always squishes under our knives. Thanks!
ashley erin mayer
popped guitar strings for the win. wrap it around chop sticks and you get the whole wood and iron industrial thing going on as well
I like the guitar string idea. My son is a guitarist so we have no shortage of old guitar strings he would throw away anyway.
Exceptional for Cheesecake as well.
Clever tip!