Nora Singley

Queso fresco may rival goat cheese, feta, and ricotta as one of the best cheeses to have on hand during hot summer months, when lighter, fresh cheeses make the best accompaniment to grilled food and summer vegetables. Here’s what you need to know about this versatile cheese.Queso Fresco is a soft, fresh Mexican cheese traditionally made from raw cow milk or a combination of cow and goat milk. In the U.S., pasteurized versions are the most common.

They're always right next to each other at the store, in nearly identical packaging. Here's the real difference between these creamy cheeses.

Because you don't want to ruin a wedge or block with a lack of parenting skills!

I don’t have kids. But I’m an aunt. And the other day, I decided to involve my twin niece and nephew in a tasting designed to gauge their openness to so-called grownup cheeses. Because while I can’t blame my busy sister for feeding her kids quesadillas with pre-shredded cheese, I’ve always wondered if she doesn’t give their palates enough credit.Here, the results on how various cheeses fared, plus other ideas for gateway cheeses to feed the kiddies.

Love French onion soup more for the topping than for the soup itself? Look no further for some inspiration to French onion-ify your other favorite soups.Think of this soup topper as a tasty lid that’ll make any soup beneath even more delicious. With the addition of bread and cheese, any soup transforms into an instant meal, and the process is just about as easy as it gets. The options are endless for which soups make the best candidates, too.

The cheese questions we field the most mainly pertain to the lifespan of cheese: How long does cheese last? How do I know when a cheese has gone bad?What’s good versus bad mold?Armed with some of our helpful tutorials on how to store cheese best, you may never have to confront the issue of unwanted mold again. But if you do, there’s a new verb to learn: To face.It’s simple. If cheese has mold on it, you can be rid of it in one of two ways.

Have you been seeing cheese prices climbing upwards of $30 or even $40 per pound? If cheese is on your list of staples, we know what you’re thinking: Stop the insanity!There’s so much potential for economic change to take place in today’s election, but until our economy shakes off the brutality of the past few months (or years, depending on how you’re looking at things), we’ll continue to monitor our budgets.

For those of you who have never understood the intrigue of Stilton, or especially if you’re among the many who support its well-known title as “The King of Cheese,” a new cheese beckons, and is in actuality a closer embodiment of that moniker than anything being marketed as Stilton today. It also happens to be a cheese that made me stop entirely in my tracks from pure gustatory satisfaction.By unfortunate law, all Stilton must be made from pasteurized milk.

The obvious choice cheese-wise for lunch is a piece of shrink-wrapped string cheese. Pretty mundane. In the spirit of keeping with our week’s theme of great contenders for lunch boxes, we’re profiling something far more compelling, but along the same vein: Armenian string cheese, speckled with black caraway seeds, infused with one of the most obscure spices around, and with strings so long they put those stubby cheese sticks to shame.

We’ve known for a long time that adding cheese rinds to soups and stews adds depth to your dish. But have you thought of making a stock with your rinds? You can use it in place of chicken or vegetable stock or broth and we guarantee you’ll love the results.

Ever wonder about the whitish spots of crunch in your cheese? People have a wide variety of theories on those little crystalline bits. No, it’s not salt, it’s not something deliberately added during cheesemaking, it’s not that the cheese is old and it’s starting to dry out, and it’s not a cheese mite.Today we’re setting the record straight in a big reveal of the little known component in some of your favorite cheeses.

Stop right there. Before you skip over this post because you (like many others, we’re afraid) have minimal interest in feta, think again. Ubiquitous, yes, but don’t let that tamper with your impression of feta’s gustatory potential. If you think about it, you’ll realize that feta embodies some truly intriguing dualities: it’s briny yet milky, aged yet young, mild yet lingering.

Many times, the best way to end a meal is not with something sweet. And luckily, the European trend to serve cheese as dessert is catching on more and more everyday in this country. We see it in restaurants everywhere, but how can you create your own dessert course at home?Read on for some of our favorite after dinner cheeses and the accompaniments we love to serve alongside.The best part about serving cheese for dessert is that it’s fast and easy.

When it comes to cheese, one of the most oft-asked and misunderstood queries is in regards to rind.There are two basic schools of thought when it comes to the question of The Rind. The first argues that the true essence of a cheese lives within the bounty of its rind, and that it’s therefore not to be skipped. The second supports the act of delving solely into the interior paste, and doing away with the disruptive complexity of its crust.Neither theory is exclusively correct, really.

Sure, we may never go as far as describing cottage cheese as refined, or elegant, or even complex, but deserving of some air time it is. We hereby extoll its simplicity and versatility and deride its mistaken identity solely as a dieter’s delight.Just what is it, though, how is it made, and what are the best ways to enjoy it?Just the visual sight of cottage cheese is actually a good way to understand the cheesemaking process.

Milk is white, so why is some cheese orange? What is the culprit responsible for this color change in cheese and why would some cheesemakers choose to rob their cheese of its natural tint in the first place? (It’s not as devious as it sounds.)Cheese can be colored with a coloring agent called annatto. It’s a natural food coloring that comes from the Annatto (also known as Achiote) tree, grown in the tropical regions of Central and South America.

Cheese nerds, come hither. Have you ever really thought about why blue cheese is the color that gives it its name? And what’s the key element necessary to activate that blueness?Blue cheeses are unique for many reasons, but most significantly, they stand out from the other families of cheese because of the way they ripen. While most other cheeses are bacteria-ripened, like washed-rind cheeses, blue cheeses ripen from mold activity.

It’s one of the most widely recognized names in the gourmet cheese marketplace. And for good reason. Here, all you’ve ever wanted to know about this Spanish cheese warrior, which has dominated the modern day cheese frontier for a much shorter period of time than it’s actually been around.Characterized by a mildly gamy (think lamb choppy) flavor and a hazelnutty sweetness, Manchego is everywhere.