If you've ever found yourself face-to-face with a beautiful charcuterie board and been stumped by rinds on any cheeses, you're not alone. Not all cheese rinds are meant to be eaten, but plenty are.

"You could do a big beautiful piece of one [cheese ... ‘You’re an Alpine cheese,’ but part of that rind is also showing the age of it too. So it’s telling a story. If you remove something ...

In the cheese’s thick exterior rind, microbes teem, jockey, and help create a covering to keep in moisture.

The distinctive smells they give off come from the cheeses’ rinds—specifically, the multitude of microbes blooming on the crumbly or waxy surface of the creamy curd. “The cheese rind microbiome lets ...

The rind actually comes from these leaves ... cultures. You see these beautiful white molds around the cheese? That's what the cultures will trigger in the aging process later on.