How to Buy Cheese Online in the UK: What Travels Well and What Doesn't

Cheese is a living product, and that is the whole problem with buying it online. A wedge of mature cheddar can spend an afternoon in a van and shrug it off. A ripe, oozy soft cheese can go from perfect to ammonia-scented in the same window. The trick isn't finding the best shop — it's matching what you order to how it travels.

Match the cheese to the journey

Before you get anywhere near a basket, think about what happens between the dairy and your kitchen. Most online cheese disappointment isn't the shop's fault. It's a soft cheese ordered in a heatwave, or a mixed box where half the contents were past their best before the other half had even woken up.

Hard cheeses: the safe bets

Dense, low-moisture, rinded or waxed cheeses are built for transit. Mature cheddar, Caerphilly, Lancashire, Wensleydale, double Gloucester, aged sheep's cheeses — these will sit in a sorting office on a warm afternoon and come out the other side perfectly fine.

Buy these in bigger cuts where you can. A whole truckle or a large wedge keeps far better than a thin slice, because there's less surface area drying out and less rind lost to the knife. If you're feeding a crowd, building a Christmas board, or packing a picnic, this is where to spend your money and your optimism.

Soft, bloomy and washed-rind: buy with care

Brie-style and Camembert-style cheeses, goat's logs, washed-rind numbers — these are the ones that arrive slumped, sweating, or smelling faintly of cleaning fluid. They are also, annoyingly, the ones people most want to order.

Order them when the weather is cool. Autumn through early spring is the sensible window. In summer, think twice, and if you do go ahead, plan for them to arrive on a day when someone is definitely in and the fridge is definitely empty enough to take them.

Eat soft cheeses soon after they land. They do not improve with a fortnight in the fridge — they just get stronger and sadder.

Blue cheese: tougher than it looks

Stilton, blue Cheshire, blue Wensleydale and their relatives are surprisingly robust. Salt and mould do a lot of preservation work. The catch is the smell. A blue left loose in the fridge will scent your butter, your milk and your leftovers. Double-wrap it and give it its own box.

Read the listing properly

Most listings tell you more than you'd think, if you slow down.

• Cut size and shape. A whole truckle keeps longer than a pre-cut wedge. A wedge keeps longer than a thin slice.
• Packaging. Vacuum-sealed travels best. Waxed is good. Cloth-bound is traditional and lovely, but it needs more attention once it's in your kitchen.
• Cut to order or pre-packed. Cut to order is usually fresher, but it has a shorter life ahead of it. Pre-packed is more predictable.
• Mixed boxes. Check whether everything ripens at the same rate. A box with a hard cheddar and a ripe soft cheese will be at its best on two different days, and you'll end up throwing one of them away.
• Rind. Natural rind, waxed, or a plastic coating. It matters for how you store it.

Delivery day: the bit people get wrong

British weather does not cooperate. A mild Tuesday in March can behave like July, and your cheese has no say in the matter.

• Pick a day you'll actually be in. Cheese left in a porch or behind the bin in warm weather is a write-off, and no amount of fridge time will bring it back.
• Use a work address or a neighbour if you can't be home. This is the single easiest fix.
• Avoid the end of the week in summer. A parcel sitting in a depot over a weekend is the classic way to ruin a good order.
• Trust your hand, not the tracking. If the box arrives warm and the ice packs are liquid, get it into the fridge quickly and eat the soft cheeses first.

When the box lands

Chill first, taste later

Straight into the fridge, especially anything soft. Cold slows ripening down. Don't be tempted to unwrap everything and admire it on the counter for an hour.

Then let it breathe before eating

Take out only what you're about to eat and give it half an hour at room temperature. Cold mutes flavour badly. This costs nothing and improves a cheese board more than any gadget you could buy.

Check it over sensibly

A little moisture in the wrapper is normal. A bit of rind mould on a hard cheese is normal too — scrape it off and carry on. An ammonia smell, a slimy rind, or a pinkish tinge on a soft cheese is not normal. That's a complaint, not a rescue mission.

Storing it properly in a British fridge

Fridges are cold and dry. Cheese wants cool and slightly humid. That mismatch is why so much cheese goes wrong at home.

• Use the salad drawer. It's the most humid part of the fridge and the kindest spot.
• Wrap in greaseproof or wax paper, then loosely in a paper bag or a lidded box. Cling film traps moisture, makes cheese sweat, and turns rinds slimy.
• Keep blues separate, double-wrapped, in their own container.
• Keep soft cheeses in a lidded tub, sitting on paper rather than plastic.
• Don't store cheese next to onions, smoked fish or anything pungent. It absorbs everything.
• Leave the rind on hard cheeses. It's doing a job.

Ripening and eating order

If you've bought a mixed selection, eat in order of ripeness. Soft and washed-rind first, blues next, hard cheeses last. Hard cheese will keep improving for weeks; soft cheese is on a countdown from the moment it arrives.

Cut it properly, too. Take wedges from the point of a triangular piece rather than slicing across the middle, so the whole thing dries out evenly. A whole round should be cut like a cake, not sliced across like a loaf.

Freezing, rinds and leftovers

Hard cheeses freeze reasonably well if you grate them first — cheddar, Lancashire, Wensleydale all work. The texture goes crumbly, so use the results for cooking: toasties, sauces, scones, a proper rarebit. Soft cheeses don't freeze well at all; don't bother.

Rinds are worth keeping. Hard rinds go into a soup or a slow-cooked stew and add a savoury depth you can't fake. Odds and ends of hard cheese become a cheese sauce or a savoury scone. Nothing needs to be wasted, and nothing needs to be eaten out of obligation either.

A quick checklist before you pay

• Is this a cheese that travels well, in this season?
• Whole or cut? Whole keeps longer.
• Will I be in on delivery day, or is there a better address?
• Have I got greaseproof paper and a box to store it in?
• Is there room in the salad drawer?
• Am I ordering more soft cheese than I can realistically eat?

The verdict: order hard cheeses with abandon, treat soft cheeses like the perishable luxuries they are, and time your orders around the weather rather than your cravings. Do that and you'll rarely end up with a disappointing box.