You're Making One Big Mistake When Slicing Cheese Logs

If you're like me, you're probably inadvertently mashing your cheese logs into messy clumps every time you want a little chevre. Most think that a knife is simply a knife, and if it's sharp enough it can get a clean cut on anything. Unfortunately, with soft cheeses, there's more going on. When you cut a soft cheese with a regular kitchen knife or even a cheese knife, that cheese will stick to the sides of the blade and start to crumble and mash. That's why you need a cheese lyre.

A cheese lyre, or cheese wire, is a key tool in a cheese monger's cheese-slicing arsenal. It's a thin wire stretched tightly across a handle. Each cheese-cutting tool, like a skeleton knife, has a specific use. And, while a skeleton knife does have less surface area for sticky, creamy cheeses to glom onto, there is still enough there to mash a soft cheese log out of its classic shape. A cheese lyre has no surface area, resulting in a clean-cut and fully intact cheese log.

If you don't have a cheese lyre, guess what, unflavored dental floss is a great tool to cut soft cheeses in a pinch. However, since we eat with our eyes first, if you're using dental floss you may want to precut the log of chevre before serving it to your guests.

If you're working with a cheese board, you can often get away with using regular knives — I certainly have. But as the cheese board is consumed, it will become a crumbly, sticky mess. Part of the appeal of each cheese is the texture, and having a goopy mess of brie takes away from the experience. Plus, cheeses will get muddled together, causing flavor profiles to get lost.

For aged hard cheeses, it's best to use a Parmesan knife, a soft cheese knife is ideal for — you guessed it — soft cheese, and you can pick up an offset cheese knife for brie too. There are even cheese knives with a pronged tip so you can slice a chunk off your cheese and pick it up. And for semi-soft cheese like gouda, if you don't have a cheese planer, you can always use a vegetable peeler to get those perfectly thin slices onto your cracker.