Some cheese is meant to be eaten young, and some is meant to be waited for. National Cheese Lover’s Day is a fair excuse to go looking for the older sort, and to eat it slowly enough to notice the grain.
No founder, establishing act, or first observance has been documented for this day, and nothing in the Federal Register carries the name. The earliest archived listing located is a December 2013 capture, which dates the listing rather than the day.
A shopper in the United States opened a Cheddar that had been aged two years before sale and found hard white objects inside it. The complaint went back to the manufacturer, who dug the pieces out, the largest about five millimetres across, and sent them to the University of Vermont to be identified.
A powder x-ray diffractometer named them: calcium lactate pentahydrate, a crystal the cheese had grown inside itself while it aged. The same instrument, run over the small white specks in a two-year Parmigiano-Reggiano, found tyrosine, an amino acid, and only tyrosine.
That is what the crunch is, and it is not one substance. In the Italian wheel it is protein that ripening has pulled apart until an amino acid stops staying dissolved. In the Cheddar it is a different crystal with a different chemistry behind it.
National Cheese Lover's Day comes with no instructions attached. Working out what the white bits in a good aged wedge actually are is one of the better ways to spend it.
DEALS & OFFERS
National Cheese Lover’s Day ran on January 20. Here’s who celebrated with offers this year.
People have been picking white grit out of cheese and asking what it is for well over a century. In 1911 the Journal of the American Chemical Society ran a paper titled "The occurrence of tyrosine crystals in Roquefort cheese". The question was already ordinary enough to deserve a title that plain.
The instruments caught up in the 1930s. Tuckey, Ruehe and Clark published an x-ray diffraction analysis of Cheddar in 1938, and Harper, Swanson and Sommer followed in 1953 with a chemical study of the white particles turning up in lot after lot of the same cheese.
By 1974 the amino acids in the granules and spots inside Grana Padano had been weighed out too. Chemistry of that kind could say what a speck contained. It could not say what crystal the speck was.
The mechanism underneath is undramatic. A crystal needs two things to appear in cheese: a concentration past the point where the compound stays dissolved, and free serum for it to happen in.
Only one side of the trade wanted them. The Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research wrote a technical guide in 2014 to help manufacturers avoid crystals altogether, and set down the reason plainly: shoppers were confusing them with yeast or mould growth.
The following year a University of Vermont group put crystals from four kinds of cheese under a powder x-ray diffractometer and settled what each one was. A diffraction pattern is fixed by the atoms' arrangement, so it identifies a crystal outright where a chemical assay can only presume.
A Milan team then followed Parmigiano Reggiano across six ripening ages. Tyrosine crystals were already visible to the naked eye at twelve months. The pale spots were not, and only appeared later, in rising numbers.
The Journal of Dairy Science ran an invited review on cheese crystals in 2021, a hundred and ten years after the Roquefort paper. National Cheese Lover's Day inherited none of that: no founder or establishing record has been located for it, and the oldest archived listing was captured in December 2013.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
About a third of the protein is already in pieces.
A Milan team measured Parmigiano Reggiano at six ages and found free amino acids still climbing at the end, from 24.2 grams per 100 grams of protein at twelve months to 30.0 at fifty. In cheeses ripened that long, the authors put roughly a third of the protein in a form the body can use directly.
At twelve months the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium tests all of its wheels by striking each one with a hammer and listening for faults inside. Wheels that pass take the hot iron brand, and the ones that fail badly are shaved of their rind and lose the right to the name.
In the United States the Cheddar industry has often counted visible crystals as a defect. In Parmigiano-Reggiano and in hand-crafted artisanal cheeses the same crystals are counted as important contributors to character and quality.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
Parmigiano-Reggiano cut for United States retail is sometimes sliced into wedges with very smooth faces and vacuum packed in clear film, and those flat surfaces accentuate every speck. Prising a wheel open the traditional way leaves rough, irregular faces instead.
The Vermont study found near-spherical white bodies inside aged wheels, from barely visible to around 6 mm across. One 680 gram sample held about 67 of them per 100 grams, roughly 2 percent of its weight.
Smear scrapings from six washed-rind cheeses matched none of the more than 250,000 patterns on file, because the samples were drying out under the instrument. A thin film of mineral oil over the sample well fixed that, and in two of the cheeses the answer came back as ikaite, a calcium carbonate in an unusual hexahydrate form.
The Wisconsin lab analysed calcium lactate crystals scraped from the edges of cheese packages and found under 50 percent of the dried crystal was actually calcium lactate pentahydrate. Serum minerals, proteins, amino acids, peptides and salt get trapped in the matrix as it dries.
Each Parmigiano Reggiano is given a casein plate bearing a unique sequential alphanumeric code during production. It works as an identity card, tracing that individual wheel back to the dairy that made it.
It must also be recognized that some consumers demand that the cheeses that they purchase contain crystals. It's a harbinger of things to come.
GOOD TO KNOW
the official Parmigiano Reggiano tasting method has tasters look for tyrosine crystals as white dots on the cut paste, and says you may feel them while chewing
in a two-year Gouda the small white crystals in the body proved to be tyrosine, and the eyes inside the cheese were found lined with crystals of two different shapes
calcium lactate is the crystal traditionally found in aged Cheddar and Colby, while tyrosine is most common in romano, Parmesan and Swiss cheeses
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Cheese held too warm gives up moisture, and free serum at the surface is exactly what a crystal needs to form there. Wrap it properly and give it the coldest shelf you have.
Ask for something aged rather than young, then hold the cut face to the light before you unwrap it properly. The white flecks are the point, not a flaw in what you bought.
Put a young piece and an older piece of the same variety side by side and chew each slowly. The difference in grain and crumble is the extra months doing their work.
The Consortium publishes the steps its own tasters use, from the look of the paste to the feel of it in the mouth. Work through its sensory analysis guide with a piece in front of you rather than reading it cold.
Ask which wheels in the case are aged far enough to have gone grainy. It is a more useful question than asking what is popular, and it usually ends with a sample.
Test your knowledge
No. It is an unofficial observance rather than a public holiday, so offices, banks and schools stay open.
COLOPHON
National Cheese Day comes down to a board, a knife and whatever is worth cutting into. Buy a wedge of something you have never tried, and give it good bread and a quiet half hour.
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