Shaving cheese is a precarious matter
Adeline loves eating, a lot and often, both at home and out. Now, that often goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This time: how do you shave a cheese?
One of my colleagues is a sensitive eater. She’ll calmly pile baba ganoush, avocado, sriracha and some of her green salad onto one (!) cracker, but if anyone dares to shave the cheese incorrectly, her nostrils start to tremble.
At some point during the working week, there’s a moment when someone, risking life and limb because what a chopping fest that is, tries to remove the last few millimetres of aged cheese from its rind. The decision to open up the large, impenetrable, smooth piece of cheese is a sensitive one, requiring enormous precision. The intern dared to do it. Look, now that’s what I call guts. We old hands in the trade were all too cowardly to do it. And everyone knows what a delight it is to shave that very first slice from the point.
Disturbing fluttering
And then it happened. The packaging came off, and we were all waiting for the little knife that would neatly cut the sides first, but the slicer headed towards the side of the cheese. I heard a hearty snort next to me, along with some disturbing fluttering. Meanwhile, the intern was completely unaware of any wrongdoing and enthusiastically began attacking the side of the cheese. Honestly, I could feel the little hollow forming in the side of what had just been such a pristine piece right inside me. Not wanting to give the intern the fright of her life, because I think my colleague wanted to save the cheese by throwing herself on top of her, I mumbled something about how amusingly she was doing it, and that it must be a family thing, that cheese was shaved differently everywhere. Next to me, the colleague in question was still gasping for air.
Shaving cheese: how is it actually done?
I know two types of people: those who shave themselves silly during the first few centimetres because only very narrow strips come off, and those who get stuck at the end of the cheese because there’s actually nothing left to shave. I dare say this is a family thing. Whereas I used to start with the flat piece, leaving nothing to shave, I’m now on Team Narrow Strips—or better yet: Team We All Have a Nice Little Cheese Block Up Front. When I do dare to shave a slice from the side—and this really only happens at night after a generous intake of beer—I feel like a rebel. Even though it’s my own cheese, in my own fridge, in my own house.
I sounded out the cheesemonger, because it seemed to me that he ought to know. Indeed. You take the cheese, start at the point until you produce a good strip of cheese, and shave and shave and shave. Once the end of the cheese is in sight, you lay it flat and then shave some from the side. That way, you use almost the entire cheese. If you do it differently, apparently all cheesemongers simultaneously turn over in their graves.
The cheese slicer isn’t ours
The cheese slicer was invented by Norwegian cabinetmaker Thor Bjørkland, who initially cut his slices with a wood plane. Not very fresh, of course. There’s the version with a blade, which is extremely suitable for older cheese, and the version without a blade, which prevents young cheese slices from sticking to the slicer. Now we know that too. So none of it is ours.
In the mean time, next time I’ll simply tackle the cheesemonger, for the sake of preserving our intern, and ask whether he might have a flat piece lying around somewhere. Seems safest to me.
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