Easy, healthy, hard cheese - does one exist?

[dave1111]

I am interested in cheese however have some pretty specific dietary requirements:
1. I am currently following a FODMAPS diet and so can only eat hard cheeses.
2. I am trying to eat healthily and so don’t want to eat too much saturated fat, salt or sugar.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any cheeses that are hard, high in protein, low in saturated fat/salt/sugar and which don’t take a long time to age (I note that most of the hard cheeses take a very long time to mature).

[fredthecat]

Hi, hope I don't sound preachy here. But if you're planning to follow a specific diet plan then follow the plan and get the results you want. After your health has balanced out then attempt to eat cheese.

I'm almost anti-diet in that a diet with a name is almost always some kind of way for someone to get attention or sell something.

Go back to basics and find some appropriate starches/grains and vegetables as a base and enjoy meat, fruit and dairy as additions imho. don't eat processed food. if you do these two things with exercise you can't really fail. i don't understand fad diets.

[John@PC]

Hi Dave and welcome.  You're in a tight spot for cheese if you're wanting to limit salt and fat.  As I understand it salting is a necessary evil to keep the cheese from over-acidifying and undersalting can cause a bitter cheese.  As for fat you can use low fat milk but for the vast majority of pressed cheeses the cheese you get won't be as good as the one you want.  I found a pretty good explaination that explains why:

Some traditional skim milk cheeses such as cottage cheese, ricotta and quark, are made as fresh cheeses (but note that quark can also be made from whole milk.)  Most, though, are made as aged cheeses, and tender to be harder and grainier than whole milk cheeses. They are harder because the fat that would have made them soft has been removed from the milk. The grainy characteristic also comes from the lower fat content. In whole milk cheeses, fat balances proteins in emulsification. But when there's not enough fat to provide this balance, the proteins form grainy deposits. When this is not desirable, industrial food processors can overcome this without increasing the fat by using emulsifying salts which expand the surface area of what fat there is, increasing the emulsification that happens. Or they may use another, cheaper fat such as vegetable oils rather than milk fat. But if there are a lot of gums, stabilizers or other emulsifying agents added to a commercial skim-milk cheese, you may not get what you expect when it has melted.

One of the most famous skim milk cheeses is Parmesan.

[awakephd]

I have doubts that you will find all of these requirements in one cheese. Low fat made me think first of parmesan styles ... but that will not work with low-salt and short aging. A swiss-style often has lower salt, but not a short aging (though shorter than parmesan).