Cheese Expert Tastes the World’s Stinkiest Cheeses

Warning, these cheeses are not for beginners.

In front of me are some of the funkiest cheeses

in the world.

From the stinky to the musty to the moldy.

I'm cheese expert Liz Thorpe,

and I'm gonna walk you through them all

in increasing levels of funkiness.

These aren't for the faint of heart,

but if you make it to the end,

you may never look at cheese the same way again.

Taleggio.

This is what I consider to be the poster child

for funky cheese.

Taleggio is what's called a washed-rind cheese.

A washed-rind cheese is any cheese

that is washed in salt water after it's made.

That brine washing helps

to cultivate sticky, orange bacteria

on the outside of the cheese,

and it's breaking down the fats and the proteins,

releasing volatile compounds that we can smell.

It reminds me a little bit of used running socks

or cured salami.

The bark is way worse than the bite.

You've gotta think about the ratio of the rind to the paste.

More rind means more intensity,

but here, we've got all this cheese in the center

and this one thin little rind all along the outside.

It doesn't have a chance to really permeate.

If you're looking to get into the world of funky cheese,

this is a great place to start.

Tomme de Savoie literally means smallish roundish cheese

from Savoie, a mountainous region in France.

This cheese, when it's made really well and traditionally,

is characterized by this thick, crusty, dark brown rind.

A lot of the smell of the cheese, really all of the smell,

is coming from that rind,

and [sniffs] it smells like wet dirt.

I used to ride horses when I was a kid.

It reminds me of being in a horse barn on a rainy day.

When you taste Tomme de Savoie,

you taste things that we don't eat,

which is really confusing.

It has to do with what's called

retronasal impressions of flavor.

You actually get aromatic compounds up the back of your nose

as you're chewing and you're swallowing

that inform your perception of flavor.

It's what allows us to drink wine or taste cheese and say,

Oh, yeah, this is reminiscent of hay

or mown grass or wet dirt.

We don't eat those things, and yet, we're reminded of this

because of our retronasal impressions.

Tomme de Savoie is what's called a natural-rinded cheese.

The rind is allowed to develop over the course of weeks,

or, in this case, even several months in an open air,

temperature and humidity-controlled environment.

These are all molds, yeasts, bacteria,

microflora that come from the milk

and come from the air of the unique aging environment

where the cheese is ripened.

All of the character of this cheese,

the ability to really taste where it's from,

comes from this natural rind

and comes from a slower, more painstaking ripening process.

If you wanna try Tomme de Savoie

but you're a little freaked out by the earthiness,

don't eat the rind.

You can still enjoy the aromatics

without feeling like you're eating wet dirt.

Emmentaler.

This is classic Swiss cheese.

It's sweet, but it also really is footy,

and that combination of sweet feet

for me is like the ultimate funk.

It's a huge wheel of cheese, 180 pounds,

and it can be aged anywhere from three months

to 12 or more months where they're really gonna start

to show their character.

It's dense.

It's a little bit chewy.

The funkiness for me is coming

from this sweet feet combination.

The sweetness that I'm always so hung up on

is actually characteristic of many cheeses from Switzerland.

They're lower in salt, they're lower in acidity,

and we read that as tasting sweeter.

But then you get that hit of propionic acid.

That is a aromatic compound

that is what makes Swiss cheese taste Swissy.

But unlike Taleggio or Tomme de Savoie

that have this live rind that's breaking down the cheese

and contributing aromas and flavors,

the rind on Emmentaler isn't doing any of the work here.

All the flavor compounds and all the aroma compounds

are coming from the inside of the cheese.

Hooper.

Hooper is a washed rind,

but it was only invented in the fall of 2024.

So, while the style may be old,

new cheeses are being created all the time.

This one is made exclusively by Vermont Creamery,

and you can see it's got so much rind to paste

that it's broken down the texture

almost entirely through the cheese.

Another thing to know about this cheese

is that it is not a cow's milk cheese.

It's a combination of goat milk and cow milk

with a bit of cream added to it.

As goat milk ages, being acted upon by yeasts and bacteria,

it releases peppery notes that read as kind of spicy

and kind of animal-y.

And this one definitely has goat-y aromas.

The only way I can describe it is that you have

to go hang out with goats in a barn someday,

and that is what goat-y cheese smells like.

Now, we're getting some of those savory, meaty flavors

that were just being introduced in Taleggio,

but we're layering on an animal-y,

spicy note from the goat milk.

The cream is there to kinda like pad your fall.

It stops it from being maybe an 8 out of 10

and keeps us at, like, a 5 out of 10.

The cream softens and cloaks that intensity.

You don't typically see cheeses in the shape of a donut,

but there's a really specific reason

why Vermont Creamery made it this way.

Because there's a hole in the center,

there's more rind than there is paste.

The bacterial activity and the yeast activity on the rind

are gonna break the texture of the cheese

down evenly over time.

You're gonna get this lovely even ripening

and even creaminess throughout the cheese.

Also, from a funk perspective, it means that the flavors

and the aromas are gonna be really impacted

by the B. linens on the outside of the cheese.

Another interesting thing about this cheese,

and really about all small format ripened cheeses,

is just how powerful the action of the rind can be.

Let's take a look at the same cheese

purchased on the same day.

The only difference is that this one is older.

The cheese has been entirely broken down.

It is literally a puddle on the tray.

Let's see what this does to the funkiness of the cheese.

Again, the rind, totally edible,

so I'm going for the whole thing.

Remember, I said age

is another layering device in funkiness.

More time, more breakdown, way more intensity.

So, if we're at a four and a half here,

we're amped up to about a seven here.

Those goat-y, animal-y notes are really, really pronounced.

This is the same cheese,

but this one tastes twice as strong as that one.

Hooper is a great example of the funkiness

that a washed rind brings with the added funk

that goat milk brings.

Valencay.

Valencay is an ashed goat cheese

from the Loire Valley in France.

Traditionally, ash was put on the outside of these cheeses

to protect the exterior and to help develop a rind

using whatever ambient molds or yeasts were in the air

of the place that the cheese was being made.

That is not how it's done anymore today,

but the ashing of the rind is really important

for changing the acidity level

and making it a more hospitable place

for certain kinds of yeasts and molds to grow.

So, when you're using ash in cheesemaking today,

it's actually sterilized vegetable ash.

It's like a very fine black powder

that gets sprinkled on the outside of the cheese.

Let's see what it looks like on the inside.

Ah, textbook cream line.

I love that.

So, you can see here how the rind

has eaten into the texture of the cheese.

It's turned it into liquid basically.

And then in the center, it's chalkier,

but still pretty soft.

This is 100% goat milk.

When goat milk is fresh in a log shape with no rind,

it can be very mild,

but when it starts to break down like this,

you're gonna get a serious concentration of flavor.

Hooper smelled kinda like a whiff of a barn.

This is like being in with the goats.

It is goat-y.

There's funkiness in an animal way,

like goat fur and goat pee and lots of goats running around.

This is where goat milk is at its most intense,

mold ripened, yeast ripened, breaking down,

concentrating all of those animal-y, peppery notes.

I love this.

A lot of people, I think, would not love this.

Isle of Mull Cheddar.

This is a classic cloth-bound cheddar

made on the Isle of Mull in Scotland.

Traditional cloth-bound cheddar made in England and Wales

and Scotland are large format cheeses

that are wrapped in cloth during the aging process.

Because they're exposed to the air

and there's ambient molds that will grow

on the outside of that cloth,

their flavors are much earthier.

This is also a raw milk cheddar,

so the milk is not pasteurized prior to cheesemaking.

Raw milk cheeses often have a different level

of complexity and intensity to them.

There's just more raw material to work with

than there is in a pasteurized milk cheese,

and it's unique raw material.

It's not something that a cheese maker can go buy

and add to the milk.

It's something that's coming from the place

where the cheese is produced.

It's got a really cave-y, like, root celery aroma.

It's got kombucha notes, it's got whiskey notes.

It's got hoppy, grainy flavors,

and this really earthy, dank cellar quality.

It's interesting to me

because the diet of these cows is really unique.

They are grass-fed cows,

but they also are fed spent mash

from a local whiskey distillery.

I can't say if there is a direct translation,

but those dark rye notes

and those fermented flavors are coming,

I think, straight from the feed into the final cheese.

I'd call this the funkiest cheddar in the world.

Challerhocker.

Challerhocker is an aged cow's milk cheese from Switzerland.

It's similar to a lot

of other mountain cheeses like Gruyere or Appenzeller.

Challerhocker is made by a single producer, Walter Rass.

Many Swiss cheeses, Gruyere for example,

are washed in brine.

They do get a salt water washing after the cheese is made.

But Walter washes Challerhocker frequently

and persistently over months and months.

It's really like building up a crust over weeks

and months where those bacteria,

they're infiltrating the cheese

and really powerfully contributing

to the aroma and flavor profile.

The smell of it is super powerful.

It smells, yeah, a little sweaty, a little footy.

B. Linens, the bacteria that develop

with that salt water washing are the same bacteria

that can be found in human perspiration.

So, there are a lot of similarities of smell there,

but Challerhocker smells like more than that.

It's [sniffs] cavey and there's almost

like a wet, furry element to it.

It feels dank.

It's really intense.

And you just don't get that with most Swiss cheeses.

Wow.

There's a unique thing that happens

with only a few really,

really excellent alpine-style cheeses.

There's a pineapple-y note that comes forward

10 or 11 months of age.

Whew.

It's like your tongue feels hairy.

My whole tongue is prickly and my mouth is watering.

Walter has a very unique aging environment for his cheeses.

Think of it as like a microbiological print on the cheese

that's coming from the bacteria

and the microflora that live in the aging environment.

All of these things are contributing

to the outside of the cheese at the same time

that the unique microflora in the milk are defining

what the cheese is gonna taste like from the inside out.

For me, this is the funkiest,

but I would say also the most delicious alpine cheese

you can buy on the market.

Zimbro.

Zimbro is one of a very small and special group of cheeses

that are only made in southern Spain and Portugal.

They're called amanteigado-style cheeses

and they're made very differently

from any other cheese in the cheese world.

So, when you're making cheese,

the goal is to get all the proteins in the milk

to coagulate and to drain off the water.

That's how you're gonna get curd to make cheese out of.

There's a couple of different ways

that you can make proteins coagulate,

but this amanteigado style uses thistle rennet.

If you've ever seen a wild artichoke or a thistle flower,

that can actually be used as a coagulant in cheesemaking.

And that thistle rennet changes everything.

They often come wrapped in cloth

because they can get so soft

the cheese will bust out on the edges,

and it needs like a little belt to hold it together.

You cut along the center,

and then around the perimeter,

you're just gonna peel that top rind.

It's like a little lid.

So, this cheese can be semi-soft to pudding-y in texture.

Scoopable, almost liquid-y.

You can get a sense of that thistle rennet

[sniffs] just from the smell.

It is so weird.

This cheese smells like a plant

and it's also made of sheep milk.

Sheep milk can contribute its own funkiness.

It can have a lot of sort of discernible animal-y notes,

gamey notes, lanolin notes, things that might remind you

of wet wool socks or a wet wool sweater,

but this just smells like a crushed up plant.

Wow.

Everybody has to try this style of cheese once in their life

just because it is so weird and unusual and unexpected.

First of all, sheet milk is higher in fat

than cow or goat milk,

so a spoonful of this is like mouth-coating,

insanely heavy, rich, and fatty.

The thistle rennet makes it sour, it makes it fruity,

and you just feel like you're eating, not bitter greens,

but sour greens like fresh broccoli with tons

and tons of lemon squeezed on top of it.

I guarantee, you have never had a cheese like this before.

Camembert.

We've seen a lot of funky rinds today,

but this is the first bloomy rind cheese

that's been in the lineup.

All bloomy rinds have this white, soft, edible skin

on the outside of the cheese.

That is a rind that's grown from a specific kind

of mold called Penicillium candidum.

It's called a bloomy rind

because that mold is added to the milk during cheesemaking.

After the cheese is formed,

the mold literally starts to bloom

on the outside of the cheese.

At the very beginning,

it looks like a little field of dandelions

on the outside of the cheese.

And over time, a couple of weeks,

that mold gets patted down and starts to form a thin,

edible rind on the outside of the cheese.

Before I even cut into this cheese,

I have to say, the smell is incredibly fart-y,

and that is extremely off-putting.

It is also totally normal.

What you don't wanna smell is a lot of ammonia.

If it smells very Windex-y, it is too old.

It is gonna taste bitter.

It's gonna taste like Windex.

You can see that this rind, it is alive.

This is a white-molded rind

that is breaking down the fats and the proteins.

That breakdown is going to release

all of these volatile esters that smell

and taste like all kinds of other foods

and things in the environment.

I love this cheese so much,

but I think so many people would not love it.

Very, very mushroom-y like porcini,

brown mushroom cooked down, cooked down, cooked down

really intense and concentrated.

The rind is a bit thick.

It's like a chewy cookie or something.

I often consider that to be a flaw

with American-made Camembert, but here,

it is delivering a huge, huge hit

of those cooked vegetable kinda fart-y flavors.

It's going right up the back of my nose.

It just absolutely smells like something

you think you should not eat, but you should.

You should go out and get it and eat it all.

Formaggio di Fossa di Sogliano.

This is an Italian pecorino

that spends three months buried in a hole in the ground.

The pecorino is made in the summer

and in the month of August,

the cheeses are wrapped in cloth,

and they are put into a straw-lined

limestone well in the ground.

And this isn't like there's racks and rooms.

They're just, like, put into a hole in the ground

all on top of one another,

so the placement within the hole

actually determines something about the flavor

and the character of the cheese.

Those that are at the bottom tend to have a more intense,

funkier, more fermented flavor profile

because they're warmer, they have less access to oxygen,

and they're at the bottom of the pile, basically.

When you smell this cheese,

it's like damp limestone

with this funny, fermented dairy smell hanging over the top.

What's making this cheese super funky

is the anaerobic ripening that happens

during those three months in the ground.

It's basically secondary fermentation that's going on

on the inside of the cheese.

It's got a very sour, fermented, fruity,

and kind of gamey flavor to it.

And because it is aged in this anaerobic environment,

you're getting more notes from the sheep milk.

Think about rare lamb meat

right next to the bone when you eat a lamb chop,

that's the gaminess I'm talking about.

This is taking all the elements of funk

that we've explored today and combining it into one cheese.

It is a singular experience.

Limburger.

This is a washed rind cow's milk cheese

made famous in Looney Tunes cartoons

for being the smelliest cheese on Earth,

and they're not wrong.

This is powerfully stinky.

This is the last remaining Limburger

produced in the United States.

It's made by the Chalet Cheese Cooperative in Wisconsin,

and they've been producing Limburger since 1885.

This cheese is deceptive.

We've seen washed rinds today.

They've got bright orange sticky rinds.

Challerhocker's deep rusted-y brown.

This doesn't look that orange, it doesn't look that washed,

and yet, it smells like it has been washed

for hundreds of years.

This is actually what's called a smear-ripened cheese.

So, instead of just washing with salt water,

Chalet has a thick paste that is made of salt and water

and Brevibacterium linens,

so you amp up the B. linen action

without it actually looking that washed.

Another thing that's really cool is that they have a smear

that they've maintained for years and years and years.

Every cheese has little molecules

of stinky cheese from 20 years ago.

It's just building over time,

adding to the complexity of this cheese

unique to this one manufacturer.

It's really like eating a piece of history.

I'm not really squeamish,

but this is a cheese I don't even wanna pick up to smell

because I will smell like Limburger for the rest of the day.

Everything I touch will smell like Limburger,

but for you, I will do it.

[Liz breathes deeply]

[Liz sniffs]

It's all the footy smells, it's the sweaty socks,

but it is somehow much more than that.

For the New Yorkers out there,

it's like the West Fourth subway platform.

It's bodily.

It's smells like many body parts all together

in one hot, humid August afternoon.

[sniffs] It just reeks.

I don't know how else to say it.

The salt hits you up front, but immediately,

there is a cascade of all these other flavors.

This is like the liver and onions of cheese.

It is raw meat, which I don't really eat,

not like beef carpaccio raw meat.

Feels like you shouldn't smell it or eat it.

It's traditional culinary application,

is brown bread, mustard, and Limburger

with some raw onion on it.

It's a cheese that begs to be put up

against equally intense, unadulterated, searing flavor.

It would mow down anything else,

but it's really the smelliest cheese I've ever eaten.

You eat the smell.

If you think you're tough, I dare you to try Limburger.

Roquefort.

This may be the most famous blue cheese in the world,

a raw sheep blue from Central France.

There are some really unique characteristics

of blue cheese as a style

that make it inherently funkier than other styles.

They're not stinky like the washed-rind cheeses,

but they tend to have really powerful chemically notes

that are extremely unusual

and off-putting for a lot of people.

So, when you're making a blue cheese, blue mold spores,

usually Penicillium roqueforti,

are added to the milk during cheesemaking.

That mold can't grow without oxygen,

so you go through the cheesemaking steps

and you form your wheel and you put it in a temperature

and humidity-controlled space to age,

and that cheese is gonna get really blue and moldy

on the outside, and that's it,

unless you pierce holes into it.

If you do that, oxygen can get into the center of the cheese

and then the mold can start to grow

on the inside of the cheese,

developing pockets or veining of blue mold,

contributing over time to a lot

of those characteristic aromas and flavors.

It's unique because it's 100% sheep milk.

A lot of the action of the blue mold

is actually gonna be amplified

by the fat content in the milk.

Blue cheese smells like mold.

[sniffs] It also smells kind of cave-y,

a little bit damp, a little bit stony.

Wow, okay.

It's like breathing in an open bottle

of nail polish remover,

and that is funky and weird

and definitely seems wrong and off-putting.

However, it is totally typical of blue cheeses.

The Penicillium roqueforti mold breaks down

the free fatty acids that are in the milk

and it releases these methyl ketones.

That's the name of the compound

that specifically smell like acetone,

so it's good to know that's really normal,

but it's really weird and you may not like it.

I will say though, that that acetone is balanced out

by the fatty creaminess of the sheep milk

and also these other flavors.

You get toasted nutty notes and fruity notes as well,

like bright, acidic red fruit.

This is a really, really strong blue cheese.

It's got a really long finish.

You keep tasting it and tasting it.

Whew, it's what makes Roquefort

one of the funkiest cheeses out there.

Cabrales.

This is the funkiest cheese in the world.

Cabrales is a raw milk blue cheese from Asturias, Spain.

It's made of cow milk.

That cow milk can have goat milk and sheep milk added to it.

Even though it's a blue cheese,

it doesn't look like any other blue cheese out there.

When it is well matured,

it becomes like a gray green mass.

It reminds me of Oscar the Grouch if he were a cheese.

It is no longer blue-veined, it is just blue,

and that's because Cabrales

is the last naturally-bluing cheese

that you find on the open market.

This is a cheese that becomes blue

because it is ripened in natural stone caves

that are full of ambient Penicillium roqueforti mold spores.

Those mold spores infiltrate the cheeses, and over time,

the cheeses ripen to become this teeming mass

of Penicillium roqueforti, breaking down the fats,

releasing all this intense acetone aroma and flavor

and contributing all kinds of flavors

that you just don't find in any other blue cheese.

Okay, it's sort of like an assault on my mouth.

It can be hard to explain this.

It's not bad.

It's just really, really, really strong and really weird.

Those methyl ketones are just popping all over my mouth.

It's like super acetoney,

and unlike a lot of other blue cheeses,

Cabrales has a lot of acid, whew,

and a ton of pepper, so much black pepper.

It's so spicy on the top and the sides of my mouth.

Those sort of like creamy, fatty notes from the Roquefort,

I don't get any of those here,

but I'm getting a lot of lean, peppery flavor

coming from the breakdown of goat milk and sheep milk

added to that cow's milk base.

Those additional milks really, really amp up the intensity

and my mouth is watering so much, I can barely talk.

It's super, super acidic.

Most blue cheeses are aged for a couple of months.

Cabrales, five months to 10 months.

You've got double the amount of time

for that mold to act on the fats, breaking them down,

and for it to spread throughout the cheese.

My mouth is watering, my throat is burning.

This is a full on assault.

It's definitely animal-y.

I would say, this is by far the weirdest

and the strongest cheese I have ever tasted.

I recommend trying this just for the experience.

This truly is the funkiest cheese I have ever had.

Funkiness means a lot of different things

to different people, and I get it.

If a cheese smells bad or it's full of mold,

it can be really off-putting.

But these cheeses are experiences

and I really think they're worth trying.