33 Books – 33 Pieces of Cheese
This is a delightful looking little book, designed for cheese enthusiasts to record their thoughts on cheeses.
The book itself is very nicely made, if a little rudimentary. It is small enough to fit in your pocket and the print quality is perfectly fine.
Each page is laid out rigidly so that you record the same specific details about each cheese. This forces you to write down things which are obvious at the time, but can be easily forgotten about each cheese. It also promotes more thought about each aspect of the cheese, some of which you might otherwise have neglected during the tasting.
The most attractive feature of this book for me is the flavour wheel in the bottom right of the page layout. They have done a decent job of taking most of the flavours usually associated with cheese and mapping them onto a circle, so that the neighbours make sense and the resulting polygon tells you something about the flavour profile. Notably absent are ‘smoky’ flavours, and I find it very strange that ‘crystalline’ and ‘crumbly’ are included on the flavour wheel and not instead afforded space in the texture section of the page. If I were to adjust this wheel, I would remove crystalline and crumbly and replace them with ‘bitter’, then I would slot ‘smoky’ in between ‘earthy’ and ‘nutty’, leaving the wheel with the visually pleasant 16 aspects.
The texture meter is fine, but I would have preferred to see a bit more detail here, perhaps splitting it into two dimensions: hardness and cohesiveness, which would allow you to differentiate between a crumbly wensleydale and a hard manchego.
Overall this is a pleasant little book that could be great for beginners to cheese tasting for organising their thoughts as they taste. I picked it up for £5.00 and at this price it would also make quite a nice little gift for any budding cheese enthusiasts in your life. 7/10.
Lover of strong flavours and interesting experiences.