Piquant and spicy
The tingle of blue mould, and cheeses made with pepper, chilli, cumin or caraway.
Piquant cheeses tingle and prickle. Some get their heat from blue mould, whose fat-splitting enzymes make sharp, peppery compounds: Roquefort, Gorgonzola piccante and Cabrales all bite. Others have spices worked into the curd: cumin in Dutch Leyden, black pepper in Sicilian pepato, chilli in pepper jack, and za'atar or chilli on Levantine shanklish. In Bhutan, the heat of ema datshi comes from chillies cooked with the cheese.
Blue bite
Penicillium roqueforti breaks down milk fat into free fatty acids and then into methyl ketones, which give blue cheese its characteristic aroma and tingle. The more the cheese is pierced and the longer it ripens, the stronger the bite. Sheep's milk blues such as Roquefort, with their rich fat, are often the most piquant. Gorgonzola dolce is mild and creamy, while Gorgonzola piccante, aged longer, is firmer and sharper.
Spiced cheeses
Spiced cheeses have a long history. Leyden cheese, from the Dutch city of Leiden, has been made with cumin for centuries, and Frisian nagelkaas adds cloves as well as cumin. Pecorino pepato from Sicily is studded with whole black peppercorns. Pepper jack, Monterey Jack with chilli, is an American favourite. Shanklish, from Syria and Lebanon, is rolled into balls, coated in za'atar or chilli and dried. Liptauer, from Central Europe, is fresh cheese mixed with paprika, onion and caraway.
Piquant in the kitchen
Blue cheese dressings and sauces bring bite to salads and steaks, and in the United States, chicken wings are dipped in blue cheese dressing. Spiced cheeses add flavour to sandwiches, grills and boards. In Bhutan, chillies are treated as a vegetable, and ema datshi stews them with cheese until the cheese softens their heat. Sweet partners, pears, honey, figs and sweet wines, balance piquant cheese on a board.
Worth knowing
- Roquefort: Peppery sheep's milk blue
- Gorgonzola: Sharp when piccante
- Cabrales: Strong cave-aged blue
- Leyden cheese: Dutch cheese with cumin
- Pecorino pepato: Sicilian sheep's cheese with peppercorns
- Pepper jack: Monterey Jack with chilli
- Shanklish: Levantine cheese balls coated in za'atar or chilli
- Ema datshi: Bhutanese chillies and cheese
Sources and further reading
Original text by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Customs are described as tradition, not as advice. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Piquant and spicy on EveryCheese
The cheeses written up so far, best known first.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Ġbejna: Chattacha, CC BY 3.0, source
- Harzer: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0, source