How To: Cutting Cheese into Nuggets

So if you want to choose which cheeses to cut what, cheeses not to cut, you can check out our video on that. But there are some cheeses that are just sticklers for not wanting to be cut into a triangle or a stick. And those are the perfect cheeses to nugget. So we're going to be talking about that today. Now, why would you want to nugget? Well one the cheese could be too hard. You know it’s just a lot of work to cut it into two sticks because it's a very firm cheese or it could be a cheese like a cheddar, which is the example we have here and you can even see all of this is these little holes here. This is all of those curds that have come together and then press together, but they don't really like to stay together. And so, they break apart really easily and will show you when we go to nugget this. So cheeses, like cheddar, a blue cheese, that's not like a real smooth blue cheese. And something like this aged gouda, and this is a beautiful aged gouda. You can see these little white spots here. Those are tyrosine crystals as they're like little salt bombs. They're not salt, their tyrosines protein from aging cheese, but they're fantastic. And people who like aged, gouda love them. So hard cheeses, a blue cheese and think something like a cheddar, that just crumbles when you try to cut it into a triangle. It's like out to get you but it's not, you can tackle it with the nuggets.
So, how do we start? Well, first you need a knife, actually, a lot of the knives in your knife drawer will work but we just basically want a point. Now this is a hatchet Cheese Knife. This iS great for a hard cheese, but we really just need the point. This is known as a parm knife. This is a fancy sort of at home parm knife. Much bigger ones are used to split, open a big wheel of parm, but you’re just looking for something with a point. You can use the point of a chef's knife, really any knife. And the idea is that you're not really cutting it so much as breaking apart these little nuggets. So let's start with this aged gouda. We're just going to basically put it into the cheese and start pushing down and it'll start to break off into little nuggets. And now sometimes you'll get a nugget that wants to crack afterwards, or let's see if I can make a nugget that's too big. No, it's not too big. But if I was doing them all this size, I might want to break that down. You just go back in and give it a little wiggle, and it pops open. So I'm not slicing.
I'm just nuggeting, so this beautiful cheese now has these lovely shapes. Again that gives us something a new texture for our cheese board too. We might have triangles on it and sticks. And now we have nuggets and it just breaks up your cheese board and makes it look special. What you don't want to do is make them, like so small that they look like cheese crumbs. We know nobody wants to eat cheese crumbs. You might get some of those in the process of making these big guys, but try and make them big enough that it's a nice-sized bite for you to chew.
So this is a cheddar. This is a clothbound cheddar. You can see I've barely had to even push into that and that wants to break apart. I can even go further into this one and start to break off a big chunk. Maybe this was like all I wanted for my little lunch here and I'm just going to let that nugget off. I can even break it with my hands. I mean, this one is tender enough that I could probably just do this with my hands too, although you might not want to go touching all the cheese if all your guests are going to eat it, but again, big beautiful nuggets for your next cheese board. I hope you'll nugget your heart out.