Cheese Whiz
Cheese and science are the perfect pairing for Mia Vergari ’05.
Mia Vergari ’05 pops a nail loose, lifts the lid off a small wooden box, and picks up a round of Portuguese cheese. It is dappled with greenish-blue dots—penicillium roqueforti, a mold common in blue cheese. “But you can tell by feeling it, it still has a lot of moisture,” she says as she weighs it in her hand. “It’s still young, the texture feels fudgy, so even though there is mold, it can be wiped off; it’s superficial, and the cheese will still taste good.”
A quality-control specialist for the cheese importer Forever Cheese, Vergari studied biology at Bryn Mawr and earned a master’s in environmental studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Living in Philadelphia, she found herself regularly stopping by Di Bruno Brothers to pick up a few wedges of cheese and a bottle of wine for the weekend. It wasn’t long before she began to think about becoming a cheesemonger herself. “It was the science of how mold grows on cheese that I found interesting,” she says.
She took her savings and spent five months on dairy farms in Europe, milking sheep and learning how to make cheese. She started working at Bedford Cheese Shop in New York City and would use her UPenn passkey to read dairy science journals. She started as a sales assistant at Forever Cheese, and when a job opened up in quality control, she jumped at the opportunity.
Vergari checks pallets of cheese as they arrive, and again periodically until they ship out to individual vendors, opening boxes in the 36-degree Secaucus, N.J., warehouse to monitor things like moisture loss and surface mold.
Year to year, batch to batch, she tracks the consistency of various cheeses and notes any changes. The rind of the cheese can reveal a lot; when the supply chain backed up during the COVID-19 pandemic, producers took extra steps to preserve their cheese—including brushing off mold and deep-cleaning their facilities—that subtly changed its appearance.
“Bryn Mawr helped me tap into and strengthen all of these different methods of thinking,” Vergari says, “Working quality control requires me to use my intuition and take seemingly subjective information and quantify it in a very logical and analytical way.”
Molds on cheese are self-domesticated and rarely toxic. Repeatedly patted down to form the rind, mold breaks down the proteins and fats, making the cheese softer and producing the flavor compounds that we perceive as buttery or “mushroomy.”
“It’s kind of like fermented foods,” Vergari says. “Cheese is controlled spoilage.”
The exterior mold influences the flavor several centimeters into the cheese, to what is called the “cream line,” where there can be a visible change in texture. The cheese is also flavored from the inside by starter cultures that sometimes produce “eyes,” or the gas bubbles seen most commonly in Swiss cheese.
Bryn Mawr helped me tap into and strengthen all of these different methods of thinking.
Vergari enjoyed learning how different types of cheese developed, marrying science and folklore. Gouda, in its red wax rounds, was developed to travel across the sea without cracking open. Europeans would hide cheese in barrels of spent wine grapes to evade the tax collectors or deep inside caves to protect it from invaders.
“All of this knowledge is like an oral history,” she says. "It's passed down from the older cheesemonger to the younger cheesemonger.”
What’s the most common misconception about her job? Probably that she eats more cheese than she actually does, Vergari says. Though, of course, there is a lot of cheese around to sample—often, as she calls it, “for science.” She’s always game to scrape off outside mold and see how a cheese is faring past its prime.
“I’m really lucky to be here and keep learning all of these things and eating cheese.”
Cheese Tips
1. Looking for pairings? Fruit such as apples and figs go well with most cheeses, and you can’t go wrong pairing wine and cheese from the same region. For a more unexpected combination, try blue cheese with chocolate.
2. Not all mold is bad. If mold grows on your cheese, you can cut it off or brush it off to remove the spores that breed more mold. But if it’s a high-moisture cheese, Vergari says, “throw it out.”
3. Cheese should be brought to room temperature before serving. But it’s best not to preslice. Those “sweaty” beads that develop on sliced cheese are the fats leaking out, and with the fat goes the flavor.
Published on: 02/28/2025