- yesterday
Join cheese expert Liz Thorpe as she dives nose-first into some of the world’s stinkiest cheeses. From pungent blue varieties like Roquefort and Cabrales to aromatic washed-rind cheeses like Taleggio and Emmentaler, these intensely flavored selections are not for the faint of heart. Discover the science behind the stink, what makes these cheeses so unique, and why cheese lovers can’t get enough of them.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Warning! These cheeses are not for beginners. In front of me are some of the funkiest cheeses
00:06in the world, from the stinky to the musty to the moldy. I'm cheese expert Liz Thorpe,
00:11and I'm going to walk you through them all in increasing levels of funkiness. These aren't
00:17for the faint of heart, but if you make it to the end, you may never look at cheese the same way
00:22again. Taleggio. This is what I consider to be the poster child for funky cheese. Taleggio is what's
00:31called a washed rind cheese. A washed rind cheese is any cheese that is washed in salt water after
00:38it's made. That brine washing helps to cultivate sticky orange bacteria on the outside of the cheese,
00:45and it's breaking down the fats and the proteins, releasing volatile compounds that we can smell.
00:52It reminds me a little bit of used running socks or cured salami. The bark is way worse than the bite.
01:01You've got to think about the ratio of the rind to the paste. More rind means more intensity,
01:06but here we've got all this cheese in the center and this one thin little rind all along the outside.
01:13It doesn't have a chance to really permeate. If you're looking to get into the world of funky
01:18cheese, this is a great place to start. Tomme de Savoie literally means smallish, roundish cheese
01:26from Savoie, a mountainous region in France. This cheese, when it's made really well and
01:32traditionally, is characterized by this thick, crusty, dark brown rind. A lot of the smell of the cheese,
01:39really all of the smell is coming from that rind, and it smells like wet dirt. I used to ride horses
01:46when I was a kid. It reminds me of being in a horse barn on a rainy day. When you taste Tomme de Savoie,
01:53you taste things that we don't eat, which is really confusing. It has to do with what's called
01:58retronasal impressions of flavor. You actually get aromatic compounds up the back of your nose as
02:04you're chewing and you're swallowing that inform your perception of flavor. It's what allows us to
02:10drink wine or taste cheese and say, oh yeah, this is reminiscent of hay or mown grass or wet dirt. We
02:17don't eat those things, and yet we're reminded of this because of our retronasal impressions.
02:22Tomme de Savoie is what's called a natural rinded cheese. The rind is allowed to develop over the
02:28course of weeks, or in this case even several months, in an open air, temperature and humidity
02:34controlled environment. These are all molds, yeasts, bacteria, microflora that come from the milk and
02:42come from the air of the unique aging environment where the cheese is ripened. All of the character of
02:48this cheese, the ability to really taste where it's from, comes from this natural rind and comes
02:54from a slower, more painstaking ripening process. If you want to try Tomme de Savoie but you're a
02:59little freaked out by the earthiness, don't eat the rind. You can still enjoy the aromatics without
03:05feeling like you're eating wet dirt. Emmentaler. This is classic Swiss cheese. It's sweet, but it also
03:13really is footy and that combination of sweet feet for me is like the ultimate funk. It's a huge wheel
03:21of cheese, 180 pounds, and it can be aged anywhere from three months to 12 or more months where they're
03:28really going to start to show their character. It's dense. It's a little bit chewy. The funkiness for me
03:36is coming from this sweet feet combination. The sweetness that I'm always so hung up on is
03:42actually characteristic of many cheeses from Switzerland. They're lower in salt, they're lower
03:48in acidity, and we read that as tasting sweeter. But then you get that hit of propionic acid that is
03:56an aromatic compound that is what makes Swiss cheese taste Swiss-y. But unlike Taleggio or Tomme de Savoie,
04:04that have this live rind that's breaking down the cheese and contributing aromas and flavors,
04:08the rind on Emmentaler isn't doing any of the work here. All the flavor compounds and all the aroma
04:14compounds are coming from the inside of the cheese. Hooper. Hooper is a washed rind, but it was only
04:21invented in the fall of 2024. So while the style may be old, new cheeses are being created all the time.
04:28This one is made exclusively by Vermont Creamery. And you can see it's got so much rind to paste that
04:36it's broken down the texture almost entirely through the cheese. Another thing to know about this cheese
04:43is that it is not a cow's milk cheese. It's a combination of goat milk and cow milk with a bit
04:48of cream added to it. As goat milk ages being acted upon by yeasts and bacteria, it releases peppery notes
04:57that read as kind of spicy and kind of animally. And this one definitely has goaty aromas. The only way
05:05I can describe it is that you have to go hang out with goats in a barn someday, and that is what goaty
05:09cheese smells like. Now we're getting some of those savory, meaty flavors that were just being introduced
05:18into legium, but we're layering on an animally spicy note from the goat milk. The cream is there to kind
05:25of like pad your fall. It stops it from being maybe an 8 out of 10 and keeps us at like a 5 out of 10.
05:33The cream softens and cloaks that intensity. You don't typically see cheeses in the shape of a
05:39donut, but there's a really specific reason why Vermont Creamery made it this way. Because there's
05:43a hole in the center, there's more rind than there is paste. The bacterial activity and the yeast
05:49activity on the rind are going to break the texture of the cheese down evenly over time. You're going to
05:55get this lovely even ripening and even creaminess throughout the cheese. Also from a funk perspective,
06:02it means that the flavors and the aromas are going to be really impacted by the bean linens on the outside
06:07of the cheese. Another interesting thing about this cheese and really about all small format ripened
06:14cheeses is just how powerful the action of the rind can be. Let's take a look at the same cheese
06:22purchased on the same day. The only difference is that this one is older. The cheese has been entirely
06:29broken down. It is literally a puddle on the tray. Let's see what this does to the funkiness of the cheese.
06:36Again, the rind, totally edible, so I'm going for the whole thing.
06:41Remember I said age is another layering device and funkiness? More time, more breakdown, way more
06:49intensity. So if we're at a four and a half here, we're amped up to about a seven here. Those goaty,
06:55animal-y notes are really, really pronounced. This is the same cheese, but this one tastes twice as strong
07:02as that one. Hooper is a great example of the funkiness that a washed rind brings with the added funk that goat
07:09milk brings. Valencé. Valencé is an ashed goat cheese from the Loire Valley in France. Traditionally,
07:17ash was put on the outside of these cheeses to protect the exterior and to help develop a rind using whatever
07:25ambient molds or yeasts were in the air of the place that the cheese was being made. That is not
07:31how it's done anymore today, but the ashing of the rind is really important for changing the acidity
07:37level and making it a more hospitable place for certain kinds of yeasts and molds to grow. So when
07:43you're using ash in cheese making today, it's actually sterilized vegetable ash. It's like a very
07:49fine black powder that gets sprinkled on the outside of the cheese. Let's see what it looks like on the
07:54inside. Ah, textbook cream line. I love that. So you can see here how the rind has eaten into the texture of
08:03the cheese. It's turned it into liquid basically. And then in the center, it's chalkier but still pretty
08:10soft. This is 100% goat milk. When goat milk is fresh in a log shape with no rind, it can be very mild.
08:19But when it starts to break down like this, you're going to get a serious concentration of flavor.
08:25Hooper smelled kind of like a whiff of a barn. This is like being in with the goats. It is goaty.
08:33There's funkiness in an animal way like goat fur and goat pee and lots of goats running around.
08:41This is where goat milk is at its most intense. Mold ripened, yeast ripened, breaking down,
08:49concentrating all of those animal-y peppery notes. I love this. A lot of people I think would not love this.
08:56Isle of Mole Cheddar. This is a classic cloth-bound cheddar made on the Isle of Mole in Scotland.
09:03Traditional cloth-bound cheddars made in England, in Wales, in Scotland are large format cheeses that
09:10are wrapped in cloth during the aging process. Because they're exposed to the air and there's
09:16ambient molds that will grow on the outside of that cloth, their flavors are much earthier. This is also
09:22a raw milk cheddar, so the milk is not pasteurized prior to cheese making. Raw milk cheeses often have a
09:29different level of complexity and intensity to them. There's just more raw material to work with than
09:35there is in a pasteurized milk cheese. And it's unique raw material. It's not something that a
09:40cheese maker can go buy and add to the milk. It's something that's coming from the place where the
09:45cheese is produced. It's got a really cavey, like root celery aroma. It's got kombucha notes. It's got
09:56whiskey notes. It's got hoppy, grainy flavors. And this really earthy, dank cellar quality. It's
10:04interesting to me because the diet of these cows is really unique. They are grass-fed cows, but they
10:09also are fed spent mash from a local whiskey distillery. I can't say if there's a direct
10:16translation, but those dark rye notes and those fermented flavors are coming, I think, straight
10:23from the feed into the final cheese. I'd call this the funkiest cheddar in the world. Hollerhocker.
10:30Hollerhocker is an aged cow's milk cheese from Switzerland. It's similar to a lot of other
10:35mountain cheeses like Gruyere or Appenzeller. Hollerhocker is made by a single producer, Walter
10:42Ross. Many Swiss cheeses, Gruyere for example, are washed in brine. They do get a salt water washing
10:51after the cheese is made. But Walter washes Hollerhocker frequently and persistently over months and
10:58months. It's really like building up a crust over weeks and months where those bacteria, they're
11:04infiltrating the cheese and really powerfully contributing to the aroma and flavor profile.
11:11The smell of it is super powerful. It smells, yeah, a little sweaty, a little footy. Bee linens,
11:18the bacteria that develop with that salt water washing, are the same bacteria that can be found in human
11:24perspiration. So there are a lot of similarities of smell there. But Hollerhocker smells like more
11:31than that. It's cavey and there's almost like a wet, furry element to it. It feels dank. It's really
11:40intense. And you just don't get that with most Swiss cheeses. Wow. There's a unique thing that happens
11:48with only a few really, really excellent Alpine-style cheeses. There's a pineapple-y note that comes
11:56forward 10 or 11 months of age. Whew. It's like your tongue feels hairy. My whole tongue is prickly
12:04and my mouth is watering. Walter has a very unique aging environment for his cheeses. Think of it as like
12:11a microbiological print on the cheese that's coming from the bacteria and the microflora that live in
12:19the aging environment. All of these things are contributing to the outside of the cheese at the
12:25same time that the unique microflora in the milk are defining what the cheese is going to taste like
12:30from the inside out. For me, this is the funkiest, but I would say also the most delicious Alpine cheese
12:37you can buy on the market. Zimbro. Zimbro is one of a very small and special group of cheeses that are
12:46only made in southern Spain and Portugal. They're called Amantigado-style cheeses and they're made
12:52very differently from any other cheese in the cheese world. So when you're making cheese,
12:57the goal is to get all the proteins in the milk to coagulate and to drain off the water. That's how
13:03you're going to get curd to make cheese out of. There's a couple of different ways that you can
13:07make proteins coagulate, but this Amantigado style uses thistle rennet. If you've ever seen a wild
13:15artichoke or a thistle flower, that can actually be used as a coagulant in cheese making and that
13:22thistle rennet changes everything. They often come wrapped in cloth because they can get so soft the
13:29cheese will bust out on the edges and it needs like a little belt to hold it together. You cut
13:35along the center and then around the perimeter. You're just going to peel that top rind. It's like
13:42a little lid. So this cheese can be semi-soft to puddingy and texture, scoopable, almost liquidy.
13:49You can get a sense of that thistle rennet just from the smell. It is so weird. This cheese smells like a
13:56plant and it's also made of sheep milk. Sheep milk can contribute its own funkiness. It can have a lot
14:04of sort of discernible animally notes, gamey notes, lanolin notes, things that might remind you of wet
14:10wool socks or a wet wool sweater. But this just smells like a crushed up plant. Wow, everybody has to try
14:19this style of cheese once in their life just because it is so weird and unusual and unexpected. First of all,
14:26sheep milk is higher in fat than cow or goat milk. So a spoonful of this is like mouth coating,
14:33insanely heavy, rich, and fatty. The thistle rennet makes it sour. It makes it fruity and you just feel
14:42like you're eating not bitter greens but sour greens like fresh broccoli with tons and tons of lemon
14:49squeezed on top of it. I guarantee you have never had a cheese like this before. Camembert.
14:57We've seen a lot of funky rinds today but this is the first bloomy rind cheese that's been in the
15:03lineup. All bloomy rinds have this white soft edible skin on the outside of the cheese. That is a rind that's
15:10grown from a specific kind of mold called Penicillium Candidum. It's called a bloomy rind because that mold is
15:17added to the milk during cheese making. After the cheese is formed, the mold literally starts to
15:23bloom on the outside of the cheese. At the very beginning it looks like a little field of dandelions
15:29on the outside of the cheese and over time, a couple of weeks, that mold gets patted down and starts to
15:35form a thin edible rind on the outside of the cheese. Before I even cut into this cheese, I have to say
15:41the smell is incredibly farty and that is extremely off-putting. It is also totally normal. What you
15:49don't want to smell is a lot of ammonia. If it smells very Windex-y, it is too old. It is going to taste
15:55bitter. It's going to taste like Windex. You can see that this rind, it is alive. This is a white molded rind
16:03that is breaking down the fats and the proteins. That breakdown is going to release all of these volatile
16:09esters that smell and taste like all kinds of other foods and things in the environment.
16:18I love this cheese so much, but I think so many people would not love it. Very, very mushroomy,
16:24like porcini, brown mushroom, cooked down, cooked down, cooked down, really intense and concentrated.
16:30The rind is a bit thick. It's like a chewy cookie or something. I often consider that to be a flaw
16:37with American-made camembert, but here it is delivering a huge, huge hit of those cooked
16:44vegetable kind of farty flavors. It's going right up the back of my nose. It just absolutely smells
16:50like something you think you should not eat, but you should. You should go out and get it and eat it
16:55all. Formaggio di Fossa di Soliano. This is an Italian pecorino that spends three months buried in a
17:02hole in the ground. The pecorino is made in the summer and in the month of August. The cheeses are
17:08wrapped in cloth and they are put into a straw-lined limestone well in the ground. And this isn't like
17:18there's racks and rooms. They're just like put into a hole in the ground all on top of one another.
17:23So the placement within the hole actually determines something about the flavor and the character of the
17:30cheese. Those that are at the bottom tend to have a more intense, funkier, more fermented flavor profile
17:37because they're warmer, they have less access to oxygen, and they're at the bottom of the pile basically.
17:45When you smell this cheese, it's like damp limestone with this funny fermented dairy smell hanging over
17:54the top. What's making this cheese super funky is the anaerobic ripening that happens during those three months
18:01in the ground. It's basically secondary fermentation that's going on on the inside of the cheese.
18:10It's got a very sour, fermented, fruity, and kind of gamey flavor to it. And because it is aged in this
18:21anaerobic environment, you're getting more notes from the sheep milk. Think about rare lamb meat right
18:27next to the bone when you eat a lamb chop. That's the gaminess I'm talking about. This is taking all
18:32the elements of funk that we've explored today and combining it into one cheese. It is a singular
18:38experience. Limburger. This is a washed rind cow's milk cheese made famous in Looney Tunes cartoons for
18:46being the smelliest cheese on earth. And they're not wrong. This is powerfully stinky. This is the
18:53last remaining Limburger produced in the United States. It's made by the Chalet Cheese Cooperative
18:59in Wisconsin, and they've been producing Limburger since 1885. This cheese is deceptive. We've seen
19:05washed rinds today. They've got bright orange sticky rinds, Hollerhocker's deep russity brown. This doesn't
19:13look that orange. It doesn't look that washed. And yet, it smells like it has been washed for hundreds
19:19of years. This is actually what's called a smear ripened cheese. So instead of just washing with salt
19:26water, Chalet has a thick paste that is made of salt and water and brevi bacterium linens. So you amp up
19:37the bee linen action without it actually looking that washed. Another thing that's really cool
19:44is that they have a smear that they've maintained for years and years and years. Every cheese has
19:52little molecules of stinky cheese from 20 years ago. It's just building over time, adding to the
19:59complexity of this cheese, unique to this one manufacturer. It's really like eating a piece of
20:06history. I'm not really squeamish, but this is a cheese I don't even want to pick up to smell because
20:11I will smell like Limburger for the rest of the day. Everything I touch will smell like Limburger,
20:15but for you I will do it. It's all the footy smells. It's the sweaty socks, but it is somehow
20:25much more than that. For the New Yorkers out there, it's like the West 4th subway platform. It's bodily.
20:32It smells like many body parts all together in one hot, humid August afternoon. It just reeks. I don't
20:40know how else to say it. The salt hits you up front, but immediately there is a cascade of all these
20:50other flavors. This is like the liver and onions of cheese. It is raw meat, which I don't really eat.
20:57Not like beef carpaccio raw meat. Feels like you shouldn't smell it or eat it. It's traditional
21:03culinary application is brown bread, mustard, and Limburger with some raw onion on it. It's a cheese
21:10that begs to be put up against equally intense, unadulterated, searing flavor. It would mow down
21:18anything else, but it's really the smelliest cheese I've ever eaten. You eat the smell. If you think
21:26you're tough, I dare you to try Limburger. Roquefort. This may be the most famous blue cheese in the
21:33world. A raw sheet blue from central France. There are some really unique characteristics of blue cheese
21:40as a style that make it inherently funkier than other styles. They're not stinky like the washed
21:47rind cheeses, but they tend to have really powerful chemically notes that are extremely unusual and
21:55off-putting for a lot of people. So when you're making a blue cheese, blue mold spores, usually
22:00penicillium Roquefort tea, are added to the milk during cheese making. That mold can't grow without oxygen,
22:07so you go through the cheese making steps, and you form your wheel, and you put it in a temperature
22:12and humidity controlled space to age, and that cheese is going to get really blue and moldy on
22:17the outside, and that's it. Unless you pierce holes into it. If you do that, oxygen can get into the
22:23center of the cheese, and then the mold can start to grow on the inside of the cheese, developing pockets
22:29or vein of blue mold, contributing over time to a lot of those characteristic aromas and flavors.
22:36It's unique because it's 100% sheep milk. A lot of the action of the blue mold is actually going to be
22:43amplified by the fat content in the milk. Blue cheese smells like mold. It also smells kind of
22:51cavey, a little bit damp, a little bit stony.
22:57Wow. Okay. It's like breathing in an open bottle of nail polish remover, and that is funky and weird and
23:04definitely seems wrong and off-putting. However, it is totally typical of blue cheeses. The penicillium
23:12roqueforte mold breaks down the free fatty acids that are in the milk, and it releases these methyl
23:19ketones. That's the name of the compound that specifically smell like acetone. So it's good to
23:25know that's really normal, but it's really weird and you may not like it. I will say though that that
23:31acetone is balanced out by the fatty creaminess of the sheep milk and also these other flavors. You
23:38get toasted nutty notes and fruity notes as well, like bright acidic red fruit. This is a really,
23:45really strong blue cheese. It's got a really long finish. You keep tasting it and tasting it.
23:51Whew. It's what makes roqueforte one of the funkiest cheeses out there. Cabrales.
23:57This is the funkiest cheese in the world. Cabrales is a raw milk blue cheese from Astorias,
24:03Spain. It's made of cow milk. That cow milk can have goat milk and sheep milk added to it. Even though
24:09it's a blue cheese, it doesn't look like any other blue cheese out there. When it is well matured,
24:15it becomes like a gray, green mass. It reminds me of Oscar the Grouch, if he were a cheese.
24:22It is no longer blue veined. It is just blue. And that's because Cabrales is the last naturally
24:31bluing cheese that you find on the open market. This is a cheese that becomes blue because it is
24:37ripened in natural stone caves that are full of ambient penicillium roqueforte mold spores.
24:44Those mold spores infiltrate the cheeses. And over time, the cheeses ripen to become this
24:51teeming mass of penicillium roqueforte, breaking down the fats, releasing all this intense acetone
25:00aroma and flavor, and contributing all kinds of flavors that you just don't find in any other blue
25:06cheese. Okay. It's sort of like an assault on my mouth. It can be hard to explain this. It's not bad.
25:17It's just really, really, really strong and really weird. Those methyl ketones are just popping all over
25:24my mouth. It's like super acetone-y. And unlike a lot of other blue cheeses, Cabrales has a lot of acid
25:33and a ton of pepper. So much black pepper. It's so spicy on the top and the sides of my mouth.
25:40Those sort of like creamy, fatty notes from the roqueforte, I don't get any of those here. But I'm
25:46getting a lot of lean, peppery flavor coming from the breakdown of goat milk and sheep milk added to
25:53that cow's milk base. Those additional milks really, really amp up the intensity. And my mouth is
25:59watering so much I can barely talk. It's super, super acidic. Most blue cheeses are aged for a couple
26:04of months. Cabrales, five months to 10 months. You've got double the amount of time for that mold to act
26:11on the fats, breaking them down, and for it to spread throughout the cheese. My mouth is watering.
26:18My throat is burning. This is a full-on assault. It's definitely animal-y. I would say this is by far
26:25the weirdest and the strongest cheese I have ever tasted. I recommend trying this just for the
26:31experience. This truly is the funkiest cheese I have ever had. Funkiness means a lot of different
26:37things to different people. And I get it. If a cheese smells bad or it's full of mold, it can be really
26:42off-putting. But these cheeses are experiences. And I really think they're worth trying.
Recommended
25:44
|
Up next
42:02
0:47
9:13
11:56
0:46
1:00
1:30
1:00
16:00