16th November 2025
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Sausage Cravings.
Cheese world in constant feeding.
Cheesemongers’ common perspectives these days.
Last Week’s Delights
When the cheese world stops off in Berlin on its way to Bern, right on my doorstep, I am naturally delighted. On November 8 and 9, international figures from the cheese world gathered at Markthalle Neun for Cheese Berlin – flanked by curious connoisseurs and sweet tooths from the capital and surrounding area. Between tastings, talks, and lots of good cheer, there was sampling, shop talk, and snacking.
I was particularly pleased that Danish cheese was represented for the first time by Them Andelsmejeri – Nordic clear, creamy, and charming.
And anyone wondering who belonged to the guild of cheese experts and who was more of a occasional snacker could easily tell: after all of the cheese courses and tastings these days (and an intense year before), the professionals pounced on everything sweet and savory around them (the lines at Wilde Wurst were especially long!). After all, you can’t live on cheese alone.
Welcome to the party, Denmark!
A New Cheese Story on the Board.
During my trip to Switzerland at the end of October, I couldn’t resist visiting the Seiler cheese dairy in Giswil, which has won several Swiss Cheese Awards for its raclette creations – unfortunately not a few days ago in Bern, but instead Swiss Peter Dörig, who is now redefining Finland’s cheese culture. Noemi Decurtins has been at the helm of the family business since 2024 and gave me an insight into how traditional Swiss cheese-making can be scaled up without losing the soul of the company. Why is raclette so popular again, especially among the younger generation? How did raclette go from being an alpine summer dish to an “informal Swiss cultural heritage for conviviality”? And how is the company dealing with the current milk glut?
Thursday morning, 9:30 a.m., breakfast is served at Seiler.
Literary Flavours.
I finally finished reading Ned Palmer’s latest work. In his Tour de France, he brings together the most important regions with exquisite cheese specialties, their history, and their faces, placing them in an entertaining sociocultural context. For people who want to travel with purpose, for all cheese experts who want to immerse themselves once again in French cheese culture, and for me as a German, whose smell Ned cannot ignore, drawing an analogy to the scent of Alsatian Munster cheese. Thank you.
When asked which chapter took him the longest, Ned replied:
“The chapters on Munster and Burgundy were originally supposed to be combined into a single one that would deal more generally with washed-rind cheeses — with a focus on Munster and Époisses, of course. But I realised that doesn’t really work: all the other chapters deal with one region and one cheese. And the whole subject of Burgundy would need a trilogy of its own and a PhD in historical geography.”
Thank you. Thanks to your brain, Ned.
Cheesy trivia: The invention of the cheese slicer.
The year is 1925 in Lillehammer. Norwegian cabinetmaker Thor Bjørklund is standing in his kitchen, annoyed – about cheese that has been cut too thick. More specifically, about Brunost, the caramelized whey product that is almost as sacred in Norway as Sunday coffee. No knife in the world can give him the even, thin slices he wants.
So Bjørklund reaches for what he knows: the plane. Inspired by his hand tools, he develops a model for the breakfast table – the Ostehøvel, the cheese plane – and applies for a patent for it in the same year. What began as a moment of frustration became a Scandinavian kitchen revolution. To this day, the little plane can be found on almost every breakfast table between the sausage, bread, and cheese.
It’s not just the cheese slicer that’s taking me up north in the coming days. A few years ago, through the Nordic Cheesemongers movement, I discovered the wide and deep cultural diversity of cheese in the Scandinavian region. During my last visit to Helsinki at Rolling Cheese, I was amazed at how culture, infrastructure, and history still shape the cheese culture of the respective countries in the far north in so many different ways. That’s why I’m taking three questions with me to Sweden:
- How does Mesost, the Swedish equivalent of Norwegian Brunost, taste?
- To what extent are the political changes of the past 50 years reflected in the country’s cheese history?
- And how many cheese slicers will I actually encounter?
Great things take time.
Yours truly, Laura