The Best Cheeses for Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, takes place on the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei—on the Gregorian calendar, that falls in September or October. Unlike Shavuot, it isn’t a traditionally dairy-focused holiday, but there are plenty of ways to include cheese in your Rosh Hashanah celebration.

“It’s more a honey and fruits holiday, but cheese is a good pairing for that,” says Noemie Richard Stein, maitre fromager consultant at Gvinage, an Israeli company that offers cheese education and experiences. She notes that since Rosh Hashanah is a festive time spent with family and friends, cheese lends itself nicely to Rosh Hashanah celebrations. “Here in Israel, in general, holidays mean cheese, not just on Shavuot,” she adds.

 

Cheese & Apples

Brent Delman, founder of The Cheese Guy, which produces and distributes artisanal kosher cheeses, recommends serving a lunchtime Rosh Hashanah cheese board. Traditionally, Rosh Hashanah dinners include meat, which cannot be eaten with dairy products under kosher dietary laws. In addition, if you or your guests are kosher-observant, you’ll be serving kosher cheeses.

Eating apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah is a popular Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, symbolizing the hopes for a sweet new year. “Blue cheese has this very savory complexity that can be a nice match with apple and honey,” says Stein.

Delman recommends a traditional pairing of sharp cheddar with apples, especially if you’re serving an apple pie for dessert. When it comes to honey, consider the honey’s specific flavor notes—he suggests pairing nuttier, more intensely-flavored honeys with aged, hard cheeses like sharp Cheddar, manchego, and parmesan. For a lighter, herbaceous honey, he recommends fresher, brighter cheeses like brie, camembert, fresh chevre, and fresh mozzarella.

 

Cheeses with Honey

Mandy Wynn, proprietor of Brooklyn-based cheese shop BKLYN Larder Cheese & Provisions, likes to incorporate cheeses aged with or made with honey in her shop’s Rosh Hashanah gift boxes and catering platters. One option is Beehive Cheese Company’s Seahive, a Cheddar-style cheese rubbed with honey and sea salt. 

Another cheese made with honey is Perisa Fior di Tiglio, an Italian raw cow’s milk cheese. “It’s aged as it hangs, so it creates this divet in the top of the cheese as it weighs itself down,” Wynn says. “Then they pour honey into the top of the cheese. By the time it’s aged and you eat it, you can’t see or taste specifically honey, but it’s infused in the entire paste.”

 

Fruit and Cheese

Pomegranates are another food traditionally associated with Rosh Hashanah, symbolizing fertility and abundance. In addition, the numerous seeds represent the 613 mitvot, or commandments, in the Torah. “The pomegranate is a very important element of Rosh Hashanah,” says Stein. “It works very nicely with fresh goat cheese.”

 

“That fresh, tart, sweet [flavor of pomegranate] goes nicely with goat cheeses,” agrees Delman. “You can even coat a fresh goat cheese with the pomegranate seeds. [At The Cheese Guy] we have a goat cheese made with little honey crystals, that would be a very nice pairing with it.”

Wynn recommends serving an interesting, flavored chevre, such as Nettle Meadow Artisan Cheese’s Fig & Honey Fromage Frais, a spreadable cheese made from goat and cow’s milk, or LeClare Creamery’s honey goat cheese. Read more about Nettle Meadow. 

 

In addition to serving apples and pomegranates, there is a custom of eating new fruits, or fruits that you haven’t consumed over the past year, on Rosh Hashanah to bring in a sweet year. “Often that means tropical fruits,” says Delman. “Guava, starfruit, cherimoya, dragonfruit, things like that.” He recommends pairing tropical fruits with The Cheese Guy’s Fromage De Paulette, a semi-soft, washed rind cheese similar to Port Salut or raclette. The cheese also has a unique Jewish tie: it’s named for Paulette Fink, a French-Jewish nurse and resistance fighter who helped save 1,500 Jewish children from the Nazis during WWII.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when choosing cheese for Rosh Hashanah is the focus of the holiday: rejoicing and reflecting as one year draws to a close and another begins. “Be creative and have fun!” encourages Delman. “It’s a joyous holiday where we bring in the new year and celebrate life.”

 

“The focus of Rosh Hashanah is renewal and the beginning, and a beginning of contemplation—it’s [followed by the Days of Awe,] 10 days of reflecting on the past and making decisions about the future. Are there cheeses you can pick that speak to that for you?” asks Wynn. “What is a cheese I loved a long time ago? I’ll put that on the board with another cheese that’s brand new to me. That gives you the idea of reflection and decision-making for the future.”