While cheese has become a saviour or a source of delicious topping for almost all kinds of cuisines, we still are unsure about the details beyond which can get hazy at times. While some consider cheese as unhealthy, there are also some who counter attack with their own set of beliefs regarding cheese. There are also many who like to pair cheese with red wine, one of the best combinations we have been believing all these years, but when we actually try it ourselves, the two don’t really go well together. Cheese, as much as dry as you think it is, is actually quite not true. In fact, there are a lot of cheese myths when it comes to cheese.
1. Avoid cheese if you’re lactose intolerant.
People who have been diagnosed by a doctor as lactose intolerant (i.e. if dairy upsets your stomach, it may not exactly be lactose/milk sugar that your body is specifically reacting to in dairy) may think all cheese is off limits. But the good news is that if you’ve been diagnosed as lactose intolerant, you can still eat most cheese! The first step of cheese-making is adding lactic acid bacteria to milk, which converts lactose into lactic acid. That one true fact about cheese is that once it has been aged for more than a month, no lactose remains. So all the lactose intolerants out there, go and have cheese guilt-free!
2. Blue cheese is always metallic and aggressive.
Most of us grew up eating blue cheese crumbles meant to top a steak or be stirred into salad dressing. But, there’s a huge difference in flavor between cheese that’s meant to be an ingredient and cheese that’s meant for snacking! If you think you hate blue cheese, it’s worth giving it another chance — the good stuff is complex and flavorful, especially when balanced out with a little swipe of honey or caramel. And, yes, some blues are stronger than others!
3. Red wine and Cheese are the perfect partner-in-crimes
Red wine can be very good with cheese. It can also be very bad with cheese. Yes, you heard that right!
Red wine often has higher alcohol than white or rosé. Add those two things together, and you’ve got a bigger wine. If you pair red wine with sturdier cheeses like Parmigiano Reggiano or an aged gouda, the two should be at worst fine together. But, if you pair a big red wine with a brie or fresh goat cheese, the wine will very often overwhelm the cheese.
4. The crunchy bits in aged cheese are salt crystals.
Salt is an important ingredient in cheese, but those crystals in your aged gouda aren’t salt. As cheese becomes older, the fermentation process breaks down its fats and proteins. Protein is made of amino acids, and as those amino acids break off, they crystallize. The first amino acid to break off is called “tyrosine,” and most of the crystals in your cheese are tyrosine crystals.
Fun fact: tyrosine is a precursor to dopamine, one of the “happiness” chemicals. So, aged cheese may just be giving you a bit of a mood boost!
