The "Fantasy, but the chemistry works" phrasing in the last box on the first tab makes me suspect chatbot input.
Which is a pity, because I like the exhaustive structure. I just can't trust it. But I guess if I was going to dive into inventing weird cheeses, I wouldn't start with a blog post anyway.
(It would be so easy to generate 50k "Periodic table of <noun>" pages and just throw them into the wild. The public internet really is cooked, isn't it).
I suspect the surface level answer has something to do with AI, but I would be curious to know the deeper factors at play. Do all popular models gravitate towards the same frameworks and design patterns?
As an aside, I'm a little bit suspect of this account having no activity since 2019 and then posting this. Hopefully I'm just overthinking things.
Thing is I'm quickly developing a reaction/aversion to these vibecoded things soon as I see them load. Like, c'mon. Claude did the heavy lifting, put some of you into the look.
Nice. At first I thought there must have a dimension missing as it put things like brie and ricotta together. But then I noticed you can choose different dimensions, and there's more than just one more dimension!
I like cheese but I am concerned about the ethics of it so I eat far less than I could. If you make cheese it's quite shocking how much milk you need to make a single portion of it. I make paneer sometimes and use the whey to make chapati. I wish I could be sure the milk I consume doesn't harm the cows. I also know they take the calves away and kill them too.
It looks good, but since the design is becoming so ubiquitous in the small personal projects space (elsewhere as well, but I think it is most noticeable here) it is also boring.
I've vibecoded a few websites for my own use that look very similar to this. If I designed them myself, I would (in those cases) not put up enough effort so they would be much less refined, but also less boring?
edit: The expand/collapse behaviour of the table cells is quite strange. So the design is not that okay, afterall.
But, if the information is factual, does it matter if it is designed and coded by Claude? I was interested in information, not really the website design.
The challenge is in knowing how factual the information is. Might be unfair, but in my head people using AI to quickly make a thing are very unlikely to spend a lot of time validating and verifying information. The time saved could be spent making sure it’s legit, but that rarely happens.
> If a Nepali dairy cooperative partnered with an Alpine affineur, this could be extraordinary — dense, butterscotch-rich, with a savory depth that cow milk can't match.
I like how "soft to hard" makes sense as a gradient, which is often the flaw in new "periodic tables," but, for anyone who might know, does Cow to Reindeer make any sense here as a gradient? I'm guessing not?
Why put comté and gruyère in two different categories? I just realized that in France the categorization of cheeses is closer to how they are prepared:
- fresh
- soft
- hard but not cooked
- hard and cooked
and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.
Bloomy-Rind Buffalo is actually not rare at all, at least in France and Italy. I can find it in grocery stores.
Look for "Camembert di Bufala". It tastes as described in the website.
Also, while I can't think of hard goat cheese in the same way as Parmigiano-Reggiano, small Crottin-style goat cheese age well in the right conditions. For example, Pelardon can be sold at various stages: fresh, creamy, dry. The very aged kind can exceed a year and looks a bit like a cookie: hard, brownish, much smaller than the fresh kind because it lost most of its moisture. But it doesn't taste at all like a cookie, it is very strong, enough to numb your tongue, you can grate it if you want to.
Very hard goat cheese exists and is called "séchon" (from "sécher", i.e. to dry out).
And yes, camembert du buffala is produced and exported. Can't blame the author of the website for not knowing that, I think it is a very recent invention* and in a very minor volume compared to mozzarella of the same milk.
*I couldn't find a source in French or English, and my Italian is not good enough.
I don't know if it's just me, but having built enough websites with AI tools, I'm 99% sure this site has been built with AI. Nothing wrong with that, but the AI look makes me doubt the content is also just put together by AI.
I dunno, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, certified AI hater, and even I don't really care if this is AI or not. The cheeses I am aware of match their descriptions well, and if AI let some guy make this in like fifteen minutes so I can read this silly, fun site on the toilet at work, that's fine to me.
AI definitely could be used for something worse than categorizing cheese, I just recognize that the moment I see a page is AI-generated, my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.
> my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.
I suspect this is a feature backed by an innate brain process related to down-weighting the storage potential of information from untrustworthy people, as a type of resistance to the human brain equivalent of a "poison" attack. For example, some guy that lied to you in the past walks up. Brain releases chemical that reduces "excitement", brain doesn't store said BS as readily.
That's totally fair, I guess my defenses aren't that high because most of what I view online comes from HN or a few small reddit communities, so I'm not exposed to much slop.
Aren’t you concerned with consuming made up information? There has to be a million fun silly sites you haven’t read that a real person put real research and real effort into. LLMs just can’t do stuff like this accurately right now.
Yes, I am, but I guess I don't assume anything like a blog or infographic online is accurate unless it's from a "good" source (news organization, citing a reputable book, etc.), just as a starting point to find something legitimate to read if it piques my interest in the topic. The writing didn't throw any particular red flags, so I didn't really care if the backend was AI constructed.
As a fellow cheese lover I would have loved for more geographical diversity, especially when it comes to sheep cheese. Ok, it didn't include Romanian telemea (I'm Romanian myself), but it could have at least gone for the Greek feta. Some Anatolian or Middle Eastern varieties would have also helped.
It's missing the characteristic element of a periodic table, which is both a visual and explanatory representation of the relationship between the composition of the different substances and their properties.
The concept is there, but it is presented as a regular table, not the classical periodic table.
The notion of "missing e̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ cheeses" is entertaining, and the only real reference to the actual periodic table.
Really surprised to see Sbrinz. I didn't think it ever made it outside Switzerland. It's like Parmesan but objectively better - with sbrinz only organic milk is used while with Parmesan Italian farmers use antibiotics by default. Sbrinz has more milk fat and is aged longer. It's so much better and we use it all the time here.
Seems like all dutch cheeses are just grouped under gouda, fine but there are plenty of extra hard, hard, semi-hard, semi goat cheeses. Same with the cow cheeses.
I really like cheese, but I'm also vegetarian. It would be a useful feature to mark which cheese is vegetarian on this visualization. I know it's not the point of the website, but it'd be a nice bonus :)
Isn’t that kind of an “implementation detail” of the cheese? Like you can’t categorically say one way or the other for some without knowing the process used? Obviously some forego that altogether, but for the majority it would simply depend, no?
(I have many close friends that are similarly pedantic though for other reasons.)
Anyway, the site lets you categorize by processing method. All the acid cure options should meet your requirements, no?
Since we're a bunch of nerds here, just wanted to throw this out there: cheesemaking is really, really fun. I highly recommend it.
I lived five minutes from a dairy farmer in Japan and he sold it to me for around a dollar a liter, so I made cheese dozens of times. Depending on where you live, finding low-heat pasteurized milk might be tricky, but if you can get fresh milk and pasteurize yourself, I really recommend trying it out.
If you're thinking of giving it a try, start with feta. With feta, flooring the PH is okay, which is a big no-no for most other cheeses (where you usually try to nail around 5.4). Since feta gets brined anyway, you don't have to mess around with an ideal fermentation environment (that being said, vacuum packing some cheeses avoids this anyway). Finally, feta has a very short aging period so you can dive in and try your first cheese sooner than later.
This website lists no sources, no author, and all of the content is littered with traces of being AI-generated (both in the table and in the descriptions). It seems hard to trust any piece of it that you don't already know in advance to be true, which feels pretty useless.
It's also the first time I've heard of cheese made of Horse milk which feels like the absurd sort of thing you'd get if you kept prompting AI to "find the rarest types of cheese".
zeristor | 10 days ago
Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked. As could some whales.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
goosejuice | 10 days ago
"How do they milk the whales!?"
dhosek | 10 days ago
ndsipa_pomu | 9 days ago
Caerphilly?
goosejuice | 9 days ago
dhosek | 10 days ago
Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch:
C: Paper Cramer,
O: no
C: Danish Bimbo,
O: no
C: Czech sheep’s milk,
O: no
C: Venezuelan Beaver Cheese?
O: Not today, sir, no.
And Meet the Parents:
Greg Focker: You can milk just about anything with nipples.
Jack Byrnes: I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?
GuB-42 | 10 days ago
I hope you are talking about lionesses... As a reader, there are some exercises I would rather not do.
coke12 | 10 days ago
ivaivanova | 10 days ago
flir | 10 days ago
Which is a pity, because I like the exhaustive structure. I just can't trust it. But I guess if I was going to dive into inventing weird cheeses, I wouldn't start with a blog post anyway.
(It would be so easy to generate 50k "Periodic table of <noun>" pages and just throw them into the wild. The public internet really is cooked, isn't it).
goosejuice | 10 days ago
Big fan of the thistle + sheep cheeses. Queso de la Serena and Azeitao are fantastic and very interesting.
Quadrello makes a great grilled cheese.
globular-toast | 10 days ago
eulgro | 10 days ago
fcpk | 10 days ago
radiorental | 10 days ago
ChrisArchitect | 10 days ago
desmondwillow | 10 days ago
lukeasch21 | 10 days ago
ChrisArchitect | 10 days ago
globular-toast | 10 days ago
I like cheese but I am concerned about the ethics of it so I eat far less than I could. If you make cheese it's quite shocking how much milk you need to make a single portion of it. I make paneer sometimes and use the whey to make chapati. I wish I could be sure the milk I consume doesn't harm the cows. I also know they take the calves away and kill them too.
chakintosh | 10 days ago
dust42 | 10 days ago
Edit: I live in the cheese triangle, France - Switzerland - Italy.
yreg | 10 days ago
Citizen_Lame | 10 days ago
yreg | 10 days ago
yreg | 10 days ago
I've vibecoded a few websites for my own use that look very similar to this. If I designed them myself, I would (in those cases) not put up enough effort so they would be much less refined, but also less boring?
edit: The expand/collapse behaviour of the table cells is quite strange. So the design is not that okay, afterall.
l3x4ur1n | 10 days ago
ungreased0675 | 10 days ago
bibstha | 10 days ago
> If a Nepali dairy cooperative partnered with an Alpine affineur, this could be extraordinary — dense, butterscotch-rich, with a savory depth that cow milk can't match.
I believe Himalayan French Cheese is doing this already. https://www.facebook.com/himalayanfrenchcheese/
densekernel | 10 days ago
Galanwe | 10 days ago
gowld | 10 days ago
croisillon | 10 days ago
haunter | 10 days ago
That isntantly invalidates the whole thing
chaidhat | 10 days ago
compass_copium | 10 days ago
soperj | 10 days ago
compass_copium | 9 days ago
aksss | 10 days ago
jrm4 | 10 days ago
AgentNews | 10 days ago
lkm0 | 10 days ago
- fresh
- soft
- hard but not cooked
- hard and cooked
and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.
GuB-42 | 10 days ago
Look for "Camembert di Bufala". It tastes as described in the website.
Also, while I can't think of hard goat cheese in the same way as Parmigiano-Reggiano, small Crottin-style goat cheese age well in the right conditions. For example, Pelardon can be sold at various stages: fresh, creamy, dry. The very aged kind can exceed a year and looks a bit like a cookie: hard, brownish, much smaller than the fresh kind because it lost most of its moisture. But it doesn't taste at all like a cookie, it is very strong, enough to numb your tongue, you can grate it if you want to.
Arodex | 10 days ago
And yes, camembert du buffala is produced and exported. Can't blame the author of the website for not knowing that, I think it is a very recent invention* and in a very minor volume compared to mozzarella of the same milk.
*I couldn't find a source in French or English, and my Italian is not good enough.
themonsu | 10 days ago
yokoprime | 10 days ago
compass_copium | 10 days ago
themonsu | 10 days ago
nomel | 10 days ago
I suspect this is a feature backed by an innate brain process related to down-weighting the storage potential of information from untrustworthy people, as a type of resistance to the human brain equivalent of a "poison" attack. For example, some guy that lied to you in the past walks up. Brain releases chemical that reduces "excitement", brain doesn't store said BS as readily.
compass_copium | 9 days ago
bobro | 10 days ago
compass_copium | 9 days ago
Affric | 10 days ago
compass_copium | 9 days ago
Mendeleev's periodic table was organized by periods of chemical properties...
wiremine | 10 days ago
As a cheese lover, I don't care too much. :-)
paganel | 10 days ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemea
pcrh | 10 days ago
The concept is there, but it is presented as a regular table, not the classical periodic table.
The notion of "missing e̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ cheeses" is entertaining, and the only real reference to the actual periodic table.
deIeted | 10 days ago
MinimalAction | 10 days ago
stared | 10 days ago
Other suitable choices: chart, classification, taxonomy, visualization, table, map, etc, etc.
jmward01 | 10 days ago
comrade1234 | 10 days ago
Freak_NL | 10 days ago
I can get a variety of goat's cheese at my local cheesemongers, including really old goat so hard it crumbles. So extra-hard goat is not a gap.
I wouldn't call the hard goat rare either, it's available in every larger Dutch supermarket; we're not talking casu martzu level of rare here.
ndsipa_pomu | 9 days ago
There's this hard one from Aldi that looks a bit like Gouda and happens to be made with Dutch milk: https://www.aldi.co.uk/product/emporium-hard-goats-cheese-00...
wouldbecouldbe | 10 days ago
See hard goat cheese example, its delicious https://www.goudsekaasshop.nl/geitenkaas-oud-1-kilo.html?gad...
monooso | 10 days ago
Insanity | 10 days ago
loganc2342 | 10 days ago
rkomorn | 10 days ago
rf15 | 10 days ago
rkomorn | 10 days ago
Lots of European cheeses still use animal rennet, including several well known AOC (or PDO in English, I guess) ones with recognizable names.
I can check Wikipedia all I want but that doesn't make several of the cheeses I like to buy vegetarian.
Insanity | 10 days ago
ComputerGuru | 10 days ago
(I have many close friends that are similarly pedantic though for other reasons.)
Anyway, the site lets you categorize by processing method. All the acid cure options should meet your requirements, no?
notorandit | 10 days ago
Mozzarella di bufala campana is my no. 1 choice, hands down.
rsendv | 10 days ago
Oreb | 10 days ago
teo_zero | 10 days ago
shoobiedoo | 10 days ago
I lived five minutes from a dairy farmer in Japan and he sold it to me for around a dollar a liter, so I made cheese dozens of times. Depending on where you live, finding low-heat pasteurized milk might be tricky, but if you can get fresh milk and pasteurize yourself, I really recommend trying it out.
If you're thinking of giving it a try, start with feta. With feta, flooring the PH is okay, which is a big no-no for most other cheeses (where you usually try to nail around 5.4). Since feta gets brined anyway, you don't have to mess around with an ideal fermentation environment (that being said, vacuum packing some cheeses avoids this anyway). Finally, feta has a very short aging period so you can dive in and try your first cheese sooner than later.
ianstormtaylor | 10 days ago
Flag-worthy if you ask me.
lloydatkinson | 10 days ago