How Nathalie Baer Chan Aced the Cheesemonger Invitational Blind Taste Test

The Competition

Eight months after that auspicious beginning as a budding cheesemonger, Baer Chan found herself competing on the Cheesemonger Invitational stage alongside one of her Murray’s Cheese mentors, CMI runner-up Reese Wool. It was already a meteoric trajectory for one so new to the cheese industry, but what’s more, Baer Chan became the first competitor, out of hundreds in CMI’s decade-long history, to correctly name every cheese in the blind tasting portion of the competition.

“When I heard Adam say on the stage that this hadn’t happened before, I was looking at my score sheet, and I was thinking, ‘it looks like maybe that’s me,’” says Baer Chan, “but I still didn’t really believe it.”

While the finale of the Cheesemonger Invitational includes only the top 5 competitors in various cutting, wrapping, and selling drills, the competition begins much earlier in the day, with a couple dozen hopeful cheesemongers who must complete similar drills, as well as theory and tasting exams. Those with the highest scores go on to compete in the rock and roll spectacle that is the open-to-the-public portion of CMI, which included Baer Chan, her tasting score propelling her to the top of the pack. Baer Chan reflects on her experience at CMI, and what might have prepared her to be the first competitor ever to get a perfect score on the tasting portion.

 

How did you approach learning to be a cheesemonger at Murray’s, which has such a tremendous range of available cheeses?

My sock drawer is still littered with the little labels that get printed out at Murray’s for each of the cheeses, so that was one way I studied at home. Whenever my colleagues would talk about cheese at work, I would just listen. I would try to learn a couple cheeses at a time; I ate a lot of cheese during those first weeks. And I just sort of latched on to it. I’d Google things I got curious about, to try to remember these little cheese facts I could use—I still to this day talk about how caciocavallo was first written about 500 BCE, and here’s why it’s called horse cheese—and after maybe a month and a half or 2 months, I sort of could look into the cheese case and feel like okay, these are friends now. And now, a year later, I have dreams about the cheese case. I close my eyes, and I can tell you what is next to what—if you ask me.

 

Do you feel like those organizational skills that your previous job required aided you in your life as a cheesemonger, especially in terms of learning so many cheeses in such a short period of time?

I think to some extent, the meticulous aspect is still there, in terms of being able to distill information and keep only the essential parts. That resonates as being a skill that came from previous work. But I think being a cheesemonger, at least the way that I’ve done it, is a little chaotic. There’s an element of organization to it that’s certainly not my strong suit. I think that a lot of cheese is about heart, and is about chaos, and is about being able to take chaos, and make something quite tangible out of it. Like, how many people come up to a cheese case and say, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’ And a lot of the time I go, ‘I’ve got this piece right in front of me, want some?’ And we’ll go from there.