A Cheesemonger Reveals: How to Pick a Cheap Cheese That’s Actually Good
This story is part of Home Tips, CNET’s collection of practical advice for getting the most out of your home, inside and out.
Good cheese, by which we mean, craft (not to be confused with Kraft) artisanal cheese — that which you may more readily find at a specialty cheese retailer, a farmer’s market or at least the fancy part of the grocery store — naturally has a higher price tag than what you’ll come across in shrink-wrapped blocks and bagged shreds in the dairy aisle.
“A lot of it is scalability economics,” says Zach Berg, cheesemonger and owner of Detroit’s Mongers’ Provisions. “If you’re talking about a farmstead operation, you have to talk about the cost of raising and feeding the animals, before you even get to the cost of making the cheese in a very different way than a large industrial operation is doing.”
Buying small-scale artisanal cheese doesn’t just taste better, but feels better, knowing that your extra dollars are supporting smaller or more local operations. This doesn’t mean, however, that all artisanal cheese is the same when it comes to price, or that there isn’t great value to be had in the world of fancy cheese — and that you can’t score good cheese for (relatively) cheap.
To that end, Berg talks us through some pro strategies for how to save some cheddah on your cheddar… and gruyere, and camembert and so on. (We’ve also got tips on how to store your cheese so It lasts longer, and how to find cheap wine that tastes expensive.)
Talk to a cheesemonger
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