Cut to the Cheese

Back in the home country, cheese came in blocks.  They didn't sell individually wrapped cheese slices.  There we no packs of shredded cheese.  You grated your own cheese at home with your own grater or you cut your own slices with a table knife or possibly one of those gadgets with a thin wire.  If the cheese in question was quezo de bola, then you just had to bring out the big guns -- the trusty  cleaver.

The cheese I grew up with came in blocks of 250 g (small), 500 g (medium) and 1 kg (large). These were what they called processed cheese (or sometimes pasteurized processed cheese food).  Think Che-Vital, Cheezee, Ques-O, and the like.  All of  those were easy to slice using a table knife even straight out of the ref.   So imagine my shock when we bought a block of tasty cheese here and tried to cut it with a table knife.  I didn't get very far and I had to bring out the cleaver to get a slice.  

We soon learned that it was more cost effective to buy the pre-packaged slices since it was so difficult to get thin slices out of the solid block of cheese.  And admittedly it is more convenient to open a bag and grab shredded cheese than peeling the plastic off a block of cheese and grating your own cheese. Therefore, more often than not, the cheese we have stocked are cheese slices for lunch sandwiches and shredded cheese for omelettes and general cooking.

Aside from all these various "forms" of cheese, the variety of cheese here is amazing.  (What do you expect from a country that is sometimes called the land of milk and honey?)   

I can imagine all these types of cheese were also available in the Philippines.  It's just that aside from the processed cheese food, kesong puti, quezo de bola, bottled parmesan cheese and the occasional mozarella, we didn't really get brie, camembert, romano, blue cheese, etc. on a normal basis.

Here, when friends invite us over, it is not uncommon for them to serve cheese and crackers.  Then they would bring out their cheese board and knife sets as if these items were as basic as spoons and forks.

So when I saw this Cut to the Cheese  Knife Set for AUD 14.95, I was sorely tempted to get it because it told me what the various knives were for.   

I resisted the urge to buy the set but I still thought it was cool.

From left to right -- (a) Medium Soft Cheese knife for bries and camemberts, (b) Crumbly Cheese knife for shaving both hard and crumbly cheeses, (c) Cheese Fork for securely holding the cheese in place while cutting and for serving, (d) Spreader [self-explanatory], and (e) Hard Cheese knife for cutting cheeses such as parmesan and romano)