alt Hacker NewsA Periodic Map of Cheese
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I don't know if it's just me, but having built enough websites with AI tools, I'm 99% sure this site has been built with AI. Nothing wrong with that, but the AI look makes me doubt the content is also just put together by AI.
Bloomy-Rind Buffalo is actually not rare at all, at least in France and Italy. I can find it in grocery stores.
Look for "Camembert di Bufala". It tastes as described in the website.
Also, while I can't think of hard goat cheese in the same way as Parmigiano-Reggiano, small Crottin-style goat cheese age well in the right conditions. For example, Pelardon can be sold at various stages: fresh, creamy, dry. The very aged kind can exceed a year and looks a bit like a cookie: hard, brownish, much smaller than the fresh kind because it lost most of its moisture. But it doesn't taste at all like a cookie, it is very strong, enough to numb your tongue, you can grate it if you want to.
Completely wrong about the harder goat milk cheeses.
I can get a variety of goat's cheese at my local cheesemongers, including really old goat so hard it crumbles. So extra-hard goat is not a gap.
I wouldn't call the hard goat rare either, it's available in every larger Dutch supermarket; we're not talking casu martzu level of rare here.
Memorandum: please do not use the word "periodic" for things that are not periodic
Other suitable choices: chart, classification, taxonomy, visualization, table, map, etc, etc.
Curiously missing human milk source. Not that I advise it.
Big fan of the thistle + sheep cheeses. Queso de la Serena and Azeitao are fantastic and very interesting.
Quadrello makes a great grilled cheese.
Seems like all dutch cheeses are just grouped under gouda, fine but there are plenty of extra hard, hard, semi-hard, semi goat cheeses. Same with the cow cheeses.
See hard goat cheese example, its delicious https://www.goudsekaasshop.nl/geitenkaas-oud-1-kilo.html?gad...
The idea is cool, but I have become personally allergic to AI generated content and styles. This one is pretty surely built using Claude.
I am thrilled to see how much Italy and France have contributed to world cheese world.
Mozzarella di bufala campana is my no. 1 choice, hands down.
Really surprised to see Sbrinz. I didn't think it ever made it outside Switzerland. It's like Parmesan but objectively better - with sbrinz only organic milk is used while with Parmesan Italian farmers use antibiotics by default. Sbrinz has more milk fat and is aged longer. It's so much better and we use it all the time here.
I was so hoping for a period table with elements like Ch, Br, Pa
I really like cheese, but I'm also vegetarian. It would be a useful feature to mark which cheese is vegetarian on this visualization. I know it's not the point of the website, but it'd be a nice bonus :)
I am shocked that soft and fresh cheese are conflated in the same category. Both the texture and process are different. Brie is nothing like Ricotta.
> Yak Milk Gruyère
> If a Nepali dairy cooperative partnered with an Alpine affineur, this could be extraordinary — dense, butterscotch-rich, with a savory depth that cow milk can't match.
I believe Himalayan French Cheese is doing this already. https://www.facebook.com/himalayanfrenchcheese/
Why put comté and gruyère in two different categories? I just realized that in France the categorization of cheeses is closer to how they are prepared:
- fresh
- soft
- hard but not cooked
- hard and cooked
and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.
We've forgotten the crackers! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nwwu6GpCTBg
I don't care what tools built this. This site is why I still have faith in the internet.
A surprising lack of feta.
Perhaps cheese from Mad Max: Fury Road Mother’s milk.
Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked. As could some whales.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Brie and ricotta in the same category :D
That isntantly invalidates the whole thing
Aside: why do all these "Index of.." or "Map of..." dataset compilation sites lately all have the same beige color scheme and font look?
What about human cheese?
I like how "soft to hard" makes sense as a gradient, which is often the flaw in new "periodic tables," but, for anyone who might know, does Cow to Reindeer make any sense here as a gradient? I'm guessing not?
I don't know why Submitter added the incorrect "periodic" modifier to the title.
Nice. At first I thought there must have a dimension missing as it put things like brie and ricotta together. But then I noticed you can choose different dimensions, and there's more than just one more dimension!
I like cheese but I am concerned about the ethics of it so I eat far less than I could. If you make cheese it's quite shocking how much milk you need to make a single portion of it. I make paneer sometimes and use the whey to make chapati. I wish I could be sure the milk I consume doesn't harm the cows. I also know they take the calves away and kill them too.
I hate how I can now tell a website is made with claude within 2s of looking at it.
not a periodic map ; sounded promising but the text is just AI slop
Since we're a bunch of nerds here, just wanted to throw this out there: cheesemaking is really, really fun. I highly recommend it.
I lived five minutes from a dairy farmer in Japan and he sold it to me for around a dollar a liter, so I made cheese dozens of times. Depending on where you live, finding low-heat pasteurized milk might be tricky, but if you can get fresh milk and pasteurize yourself, I really recommend trying it out.
If you're thinking of giving it a try, start with feta. With feta, flooring the PH is okay, which is a big no-no for most other cheeses (where you usually try to nail around 5.4). Since feta gets brined anyway, you don't have to mess around with an ideal fermentation environment (that being said, vacuum packing some cheeses avoids this anyway). Finally, feta has a very short aging period so you can dive in and try your first cheese sooner than later.