How To Determine If Cheese is Safe Or Not? – Avoid Food Poisoning

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As per regulatory requirements, the manufacturers are required to put the date of expiry on every food product that can prove dangerous and lead to Foodborne illness if consumed after a certain period.

These dates do not take in consideration many different things, like the place the food is kept at, the temperature, etc. So, here we will be talking about Cheese and how to determine if cheese is safe?

Determining the right time to throw out your cheese is not as easy as it seems. Each and every cheese has a different fresh age and demerits differently.

Today, we will consider three things to determine the safety of your cheese – Taste, appearance, and smell. You also will need to use them all combined to determine the age of the cheese.

Smell – Now we all know that cheese being a dairy product has a particular smell, so one of the key methods to tell if the cheese is still safe is to smell the cheese and if the smell is unpleasant then you must determine that the cheese is bad.

You must always take a smell of the cheese while purchasing itself as you to make sure that you are not purchasing a bad cheese. Sometimes, the smell can be manipulated and affected by the things around which it is kept so you can not completely rely on this factor.

Appearance – If you not a regular consumer of cheese, you make a mistake of throwing out healthy cheese only because it has a small mold on the surface, but you must not do the same.

You can although cut off the portion gathering mold and continue to consume the rest of the cheese and it is very healthy to do so. However, it goes without saying that if the entire cheese looks covered in thick mold, then there is no hope and you must not take health risks.

Mold is not the only factor for appearance as the color of the cheese has changed over time like it has gone lighter or darkened than it is most probably rotten. You can also look for the texture changes to determine the freshness of cheese through appearance.

Taste – Now this must be considered as a last resort for determining the freshness of the cheese and must be used only if everything else fails. Now we know it must sound disgusting but it’s better to eat the small chunk of the cheese to determine the freshness than eating spoiled cheese and getting sick. Nothing goes unnoticed once tasted, which means if you taste the cheese you can surely determine the freshness of the cheese with complete accuracy.

The cheese must taste sour and unpleasant if it not safe to consume. Sadly, the life of fresh cheese is not very long so you will have to use the above-provided indicators along with the expiry date on the packaging to make sure you consume only fresh cheese and keep up your food safety standards.