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Usually if something smells funky or rancid, we've been trained to toss it. But there is one big exception to this rule: stinky cheese. Even the most mild of blue cheeses have a certain sharp aroma, and when you get around a reaaaaal stinker like creamy, cave-aged French Epoisses, the smell can linger in your nose (and the entire room you ate it in) for a long time. Yet, in spite of the stank, people will travel across the world to enjoy this creamy delicacy. And now we know why.
In the above exclusive clip from Food—Delicious Science (premiering on PBS this Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET), host James Wong explains why a cheese that smells like stinky feet tastes so damn good. "The sulfur-like, stinky-sock-smelling, volatile aroma molecules from stinky cheese stimulate a unique combination of receptors to help us identify the smell," he explains. "But when you eat it, something magical happens: The aroma compounds are released in your mouth and they waft up the back of your nose. They’re detected by the same smell detectors, but weirdly your brain perceives them as very different than if you lean forward and sniff them up the front of your nose."
This witchcraft is called backwards smelling: the brain combines the pungent smell with the creamy, comforting taste it's experiencing on the tongue at the same time. "This combination of taste and smell has a dramatic effect on how we perceive a particular molecule," he notes, and if you want to have the ~full effect~ of a cheese's flavor and scent, always eat the rind—that's where most of the smells exist.
They say don't judge a book by its cover, so we shouldn't judge a cheese by its smell. It takes a very special food to be so stinky, yet have the well-rounded garlicky, almost-meaty, warm, comforting, delicious flavor of Epoisses. Sweet dreams are made of smelly cheese.
Or you could experiment with less-stinky blue cheese:
