Properly Storing French Cheese - Keeping Your Purchases Fresh For Longer

Sep 11 2024

French cheeses are world renowned for the quality of their taste, texture, odour and appearance. In many cases these characteristics have remained unchanged for centuries and are developed using painstaking processes. Enjoying these cheeses in their optimum conditions is essential to maximise the pleasurable experience, but even though some of these cheeses are made using primitive methods and age-old traditions they are extremely delicate and are sensitive to the wrong conditions. For this reason, the proper storage of your French cheeses is very important to ensure they taste their best on your kitchen table or in recipes for your café or restaurant.
Cheese is a live product, it is essentially still evolving and changing even after you have purchased it. So it is essential you store it in the right conditions, to preserve these delicate qualities and maintain the cheese at its best for the longest period.

Where to store your French cheeses

It is recommended to store your French cheeses in a fridge, but within this there are a number of considerations:

Don’t make the fridge too cold as this will impact the cheese flavour.
Separate the cheese from other foodstuffs and maybe store it in a vegetable drawer, or an airtight container, such as Tupperware. Cheese will absorb odours, so storing it next to something strong, such as spring onions for example, will impact the cheese.
Separate cheeses from each other. Strong blue cheese will leave traces of its odour on other cheeses, if they are stored adjacent to each other. So make sure each cheese is securely wrapped and separated as much as possible.
Don’t store cheese so that it is exposed to the open air of the fridge. The air in fridges has the moisture removed and so is very dry, and hence this will dry out your cheese. So wrap your cheese up in its original packaging, or greaseproof paper or foil, and store in an airtight container. This will also help to prevent the cheese from smelling and affecting other foods. Air is absorbed by cheese and then diffused, so if you have an unpleasant cheese smell in your fridge, it’s probably because some cheese isn’t being stored properly.

Can I store cheese outside a fridge?

Some cheeses can be stored at room temperature, as long as it is not hot weather in the middle of summer. However, these would typically be hard and dry cheeses, such as Gruyère cheese and Emmental cheese. Of course, these would need to be securely wrapped to prevent the cheese going hard, but in a cool’ish, dark place, where perhaps you don’t have a fridge, you can store these types of cheese for up to ten days. It stands to reason that a dry, firm cheese is less vulnerable to storage conditions than a softer and fresher cheese, such as a Brie cheese or a Roquefort cheese, so these more delicate types of cheese should always be stored in a fridge.

When should I remove my cheeses from the fridge?

To enjoy French cheese at its best you need to allow it to breathe. This means the flavours, texture and appearance are slightly inhibited by cold conditions, even though these cold conditions are essential to preserve it. Cheese will regain its flavour as it reaches room temperature, so if you are preparing a cheeseboard, for example, always remove the cheese from the fridge and its wrapping, at least one hour before serving.

This also applies to cheese you are cooking with. Texture and flavour is essential to how the cheese performs as an ingredient, so to give it the best opportunity to perform, remove it from the fridge in good time and it will melt, grate or grill as you expect it to. And of course it will taste fantastic.

If you are interested in purchasing our French cheeses or have any questions about our product range, then feel free to contact our experts today.