A Periodic Map of Cheese
cheesemap.netlify.appThis 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.
Flag-worthy if you ask me.
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".
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.
And it’s actually attempting a periodic table rather than just using the aesthetics as found in Mendeleev’s.
?
Mendeleev's periodic table was organized by periods of chemical properties...
Yes, the cheese are arranged by properties rather than just looking like a periodic table.
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.
I totally agree: This feels like Claude Code created it. It's the new, AI version of "It was clearly built with Bootstrap"
As a cheese lover, I don't care too much. :-)
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.
Agreed. This looks exactly like something I would get with the prompt "make me av website with the periodic table of cheese"
why would you say 99% or even qualify it? Just say maybe we shouldn't be promoting one-shot 30-second AI outputs.
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.
Memorandum: please do not use the word "periodic" for things that are not periodic
Other suitable choices: chart, classification, taxonomy, visualization, table, map, etc, etc.
Completely wrong about the harder goat milk cheeses.
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.
We've got some hard goat cheeses available in UK supermarkets (e.g. https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/282319267) though I wouldn't consider them extra-hard like parmesan.
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...
Curiously missing human milk source. Not that I advise it.
Big fan of the thistle + sheep cheeses. Queso de la Serena and Azeitao are fantastic and very interesting.
Quadrello makes a great grilled cheese.
It's missing loads of other mammals too, like seals and whales which are often over 60% fat.
At what point does milk become oil?
human milk is pretty delicious?
I'm fairly certain at some point very early in your career you thought so! You may have even cried out for it in public!!
I am shocked that soft and fresh cheese are conflated in the same category. Both the texture and process are different. Brie is nothing like Ricotta.
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.
The idea is cool, but I have become personally allergic to AI generated content and styles. This one is pretty surely built using Claude.
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.
See hard goat cheese example, its delicious https://www.goudsekaasshop.nl/geitenkaas-oud-1-kilo.html?gad...
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.
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.
I was so hoping for a period table with elements like Ch, Br, Pa
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.
Aside: why do all these "Index of.." or "Map of..." dataset compilation sites lately all have the same beige color scheme and font look?
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.
Claude prefers it.
> Yak Milk Gruyère
> 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/
I am thrilled to see how much Italy and France have contributed to world cheese world.
Mozzarella di bufala campana is my no. 1 choice, hands down.
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?
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 :)
Excuse my ignorance, but is there any reason any cheese on here wouldn't be vegetarian?
Lots of cheese is curdled using rennet, which can come from stomachs of killed calves.
If you check wikipedia, you will find that most is coming from GMO'd yeasts and moulds these days.
Okay?
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.
Yup, exactly this. I’m European and prefer EU cheese, but many do use animal rennet.
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?
We've forgotten the crackers! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nwwu6GpCTBg
Perhaps cheese from Mad Max: Fury Road Mother’s milk.
Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked. As could some whales.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
When I was behind the cheese case quite awhile ago, we had a customer who misunderstood Wales as Whales. A good laugh was had.
"How do they milk the whales!?"
> "How do they milk the whales!?"
Caerphilly?
Very Caerphilly
SCUBA gear, obviously.
Quotes from two bits of entertainment come to mind:
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?
> Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked
I hope you are talking about lionesses... As a reader, there are some exercises I would rather not do.
I don't know why Submitter added the incorrect "periodic" modifier to the title.
A surprising lack of feta.
Brie and ricotta in the same category :D
That isntantly invalidates the whole thing
Can't deer make cheese? Why is it specific to Reindeer?
It's limited to domesticized animals.
tons of domesticated deer though? What about Bison.
Had never heard of domesticated deer, interesting. I guess there must be no milk production using them.
Have you ever tried milking a moose?
Would love to learn more about how to put this together?
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).
Where is Brunost?
Not a cheese, despite the name.
Neither is ricotta, actually.
I hate how I can now tell a website is made with claude within 2s of looking at it.
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.
That website is so low effort that 2s is actually long to figure it out. Very sure that it is robot upvoted.
Edit: I live in the cheese triangle, France - Switzerland - Italy.
Not everyone votes based on effort. The idea might be interesting to people and provoke discussion no matter how much time OP (?) spent creating it.
Vibe voting. No brain cells required.
This doesn't make any sense.
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.
I don't care what tools built this. This site is why I still have faith in the internet.
What about human cheese?
not a periodic map ; sounded promising but the text is just AI slop