Cheese: A Complete Guide to Over 300 Cheeses of Distinction

I hobby make cheese, run a website and forum called www.CheeseForum.org, and bought this book to broaden my knowledge of different cheeses. "cheese" does this very well with detailed information and some colour picture pages with many different cheese pictured and identified. Thus it is more of an encyclopedia of cheese, those wanting a large coffee table type picture book should look elsewhere.

This is an excellent reference for the novice and professional alike. Harbutt provides vivid descriptions and dispenses excellent advice on everything from selecting to buying to storing to presenting cheese. A must have for the cookbook shelf of any well rounded hostess.

As a cheese professional I have found this book to be an invaluable resource. The tasting notes are particularly helpful and on many occassions I have referenced them in describing cheeses to my customers. I appreciate the lack of photographs-- as a professional I do know most of the cheeses and what they look like, I just don't always have the words to describe them and their characteristics. I have especially enjoyed her descriptions of various farmhouse English, Scottish, Irish, and Australasian cheeses not available here. For me the only minus is that the indices following each chapter do not have brief descriptions of the cheeses, just country of origin, region, and milk source. I usually recommend this book to my more 'advanced' customers -- beginners are probably better suited to her world encyclopaedia of cheeses. Let's hope it comes out in soft cover soon so the price will go down...

"Cheese" offers complete descriptions of a very wide range of cheeses. As the only cheese guidebook organized by types of cheese, it is the ideal reference when searching for a new kind of blue or discovering the different types of chedder. My only wish is that more pictures were provided, as only more popularly-used cheeses are photographed. Unlike some cheese resources, this book does not include recipes, but instead devotes its pages to facts about purchasing cheeses, creating cheese trays, regions where cheeses are made, and other cheese characteristics. Overall, it is the best book I have come across for expanding your knowledge of cheese in general, as well as to find out more about the new cheese you saw at the grocer's.