I once ran a cheese club with a friend. We'd buy an absurd number of fancy cheeses, get them delivered to my house, I'd divide them into portions and the club members would collect their cheeses from my house. As almost everyone missed the communal pickup date, there would be a week and a half where my fridge was 90% cheese. Every time I opened it, it would leak an aroma so robust, my house would smell for hours afterwards.
Last week my fridge was full of supermarket sliced cheese, 4kg in all - enough to fill an entire shelf and more. When I opened my fridge I smelled nothing but the staleness of the air inside. Sliced cheese shouldn't be smelly. Its mission in life isn't to impress, it's to fit in - into a sandwich, a busy work schedule or a child's picky diet. If I'm buying sliced cheese, I'm looking for the most convenient and reliable form: tasty, inoffensive and easy to use. That was my mindset when I sourced and taste-tested 15 brands of tasty, cheddar and processed cheese slices.
Joining me in the taste test was Penny Lawson, the owner of Penny's Cheese Shop in Sydney; Tiffany Beer, the chair of judges for the Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show; Petra Sugiarto, a Sydney-based microbiologist and professional cheese judge; and Alex Grenouiller, the owner of Marani Deli in Sydney, which also served as the test location. In the blind taste test, we tried the cheeses straight and scored them based on taste, texture, aroma and appearance, with taste accounting for more than half of the final score. Afterwards, I also tested each cheese for meltability and ease of use (what's the point of buying sliced cheese if all the slices stick together?).
The key finding of the cheese adventure? There is little diversity in the sliced cheese market. Almost all the test products (certainly the ones that scored more than six out of 10), are perfectly suitable for a sandwich. Note, three cheeses - Mainland, Dairyworks and Hillview - were cut from the final results because our reviewers thought they were worse than other cheeses from a similar style or at a similar price point.
Bega Farmers' Tasty Natural Cheese Slices 250g, $7.50 ($3 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 7.5/10
One reviewer took a bite and said: "This is like a professional athlete, exceptional at performing its one task." Others described it as "solid", "consistent" or "balanced". It has the expected cheesy-yellow colour, is easy to peel off the stack, has a typical but mild cheddar aroma, and is savoury and milky in flavour with a bit of bite. Not the golazo-scoring Sam Kerr of cheese but no one expected that in a sliced cheese tasting. The best you can hope for is a cheesy Steph Catley, a consistent, reliable performer who would never win the Ballon d'Or but might be awarded best left-back of the season if someone noticed their 22 consecutive 7.5-out-of-10 performances.
Westacre Dairy Tasty Cheese Slices, 250g, $5.49 ($2.20 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 7/10
I'd assumed Kraft Singles and its competitors (and copycats) would easily be the cheapest cheeses on the market - that's the point of them. But by weight, Westacre and Real Tasty (see below) were cheaper than any processed cheese (besides Hillview, an absurdly cheap Woolworths brand that was so terrible it was cut from the article). And despite the price, both cheeses were among the best we tried. Westacre is a classic tasty cheese - very yellow, savoury and buttery, with a bit of acidity, and it melts well. The only thing that stopped it from sharing the top spot with Bega was the fact it was a little dry.
Real Tasty Full Flavoured Natural Cheddar, 250g, $5.50 ($2.20 per 100g), available at Harris Farm
Score: 6.5/10
Bega, Westacre and Real Tasty are like K-pop stars doing their job with almost robotic professionalism. One may be slightly better at singing and dancing but put them in harmony, or in this case a sandwich, and it might be hard to tell who's the best. All three had remarkably similar nutritional details: about 35g fat, 24g protein and 720mg sodium per 100g. Of the three, Real Tasty has the least personality but still enough cheddar oomph to give life to a salad sandwich. To me it was very savoury and extremely not-unpleasant.
Barber's Farmhouse British Mature Cheddar Slices, 250g, $11.99 ($4.80 per 100g) available at Harris Farm
Score: 7/10
Lawson described this as "strong, savoury, fruity. A more mature flavour profile." It tastes as though it's had time to mature and has been made for more mature audiences. Thanks to a slightly fruity aroma, high umami and some bitterness in the aftertaste, it was by far the biggest experience of the taste test - maybe too big for the average child (not that many will get the chance to find out after their parents see the price point). If you're willing to pay extra for cheese that gives a bit more personality than Bega and you want to retain the pre-slice convenience, this is the cheese for you.
Liddells Dairy Lactose Free Tasty Cheese Slices, 250g, $7.50 ($3 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 7/10
I've done several taste tests and there hasn't been a single dietary alternative product that wasn't a) starkly different from the original version and b) terrible - until I tried Liddells lactose-free cheese. On my scorecard, I wrote, "very dairy, savoury and easy to eat". Sugiarto wrote, "nice dairy aroma" and "typical, standard sliced cheese", and both Beer and Grenouiller described it as "milky". It was so expectedly cheesy and easy to enjoy, it was kind of boring to talk about. Interestingly, many reviewers went back for a second bite, not because it was confusing, but because they wanted to.
Cheer Tasty Cheese Slices, 250g, $7.30 ($2.92 per 100g), available at major supermarkets
Score: 6.5/10
Another cheese in the Bega, Real Tasty and Westacre's mould (and my friends have the nerve to say I'm bad at puns). But to stand out in a pack with less diversity than a 90s boyband, this needed to be either punchier or cheaper, and it was neither. Like the pillow you had before you bought your first expensive pillow, it's comfortable but not excellent.
The Organic Milk Co Sliced Organic Cheddar, 250g, $7 ($2.80 per 100g), available at Coles and Harris Farm
Score: 5.5/10
"The flavour does not match the texture," Sugiarto wrote. The judges expected the firm, dense texture would indicate a more mature, stronger flavour (the maturing process will naturally make cheese more dense and intense), but what we tasted was disappointment. Beer wrote it had a "bland, flat flavour" and said it lacked any aftertaste. Lawon's scorecard said it was "one dimensional" and mine said, "tastes a bit old, builds on the palate to nothing".
Barambah Organics Tasty Cheddar Sliced Cheese, 210g, $8.30 ($3.95 per 100g), available at Harris Farm
Score: 5/10
I expected and even wanted (for variety's sake) the organic brands to bring the flavour and aroma of unindustrialised funk, but what we got was stale fridge. Barambah was the worst offender - to me, it smelled and tasted like an old cupboard. Sugiarto said it had a dry texture and both she and Beer wrote it was stale and guessed it could be rancid (Beer also mentioned Barambah's products can be very seasonal, depending on the season's milk). Unlike the Organic Milk Co cheese, it was at least suitably savoury and had a good, buttery aftertaste.
Dairylea Original Slices, 216g, $5.25 ($2.43 per 100g), available at Coles
Score: 4.5/5
Judging a processed cheese after eating 10 slices of cheddar approximations is like trying 10 different glasses of milk and then being handed a cup of blended milk lollies with the question, which is better? Of the three processed cheeses, Dairylea was the least terrible. It smells like Stringers cheese, looks as though it's been laminated, sticks to the plate and tastes like a wedge of Laughing Cow. Of all the cheeses you'll find when raiding bomb shelters after the apocalypse, this will be the best addition to your insect cracker sandwich.
Kraft Singles Original, 216g, $5.25 ($2.43 per 100g), available at Woolworths
Score: 4/10
Whenever I see the pinky yellow sheen of a processed Kraft Single, I imagine picking it up by the corner and flinging it across the room like a ninja star. I'd watch it splat on the opposite wall, forget about it and return a year later to find it's now a permanent feature of the room's decor. If you've never experienced a Kraft Single, it's like eating a reconstituted swamp of plastic and milk that is somehow not terrible. Side note: at 1,300mg of sodium per 100g, this has, by weight, the second-highest amount of sodium of any product I've encountered in all the Guardian taste tests.
The Norco Natural Cheese Co Elbo Style Cheese Slices, 250g, $7.90 ($3.16 per 100g), available from Harris Farm and Woolworths
Score: 3.5/10
After eating a slice of Norco, Beer told us a story. She grew up with a family member who insisted, as a method to reduce their salt intake, on using potassium chloride on their food. But instead of tasting nicely seasoned, the food was bitter and acrid - inedible, she said. The cheese we were eating, she guessed, was a low-salt product using the same ingredient. She was bang on. While most of the sliced cheeses have about 720mg of sodium per 100g, Norco has 300mg and is the only cheese that lists potassium chloride as an ingredient. It was bitter, bland and unpleasant. But even more damning, this was the least cheesy cheese of the day and the only cheese (along with Hillview) I didn't finish.
