Cheese wedges showing interior pate. Fotokris / Getty Images via Canva Pro.
Pate is a word used in the turophile world to refer to the actual inside of the cheese — what’s inside the rind or crust.
It’s only used in the context of cheeses that develop a surface rind or crust. You wouldn’t, for instance, use it to talk about cream cheese, where the interior is not different from the exterior.
You would talk about the pate of a cheese in terms of being creamy, supple, firm, rubbery, spongey, dry, crumbly, etc.
Language notes
Pate is borrowed from the French word, pâte. Unfortunately, there really isn’t a good, generally accepted English word to use instead that will sum up this concept. Sometimes in English people will refer to the “paste” of a cheese, but that still sounds a bit forced, and could be confused with cheese being mashed into a paste spread.
Whenever you see a “â” in a French word, if that French word comes into English, then the “â” typically gets transliterated with “as”. Thus: pâte / paste, and hâte / haste.
Other cheese technical terms
- Affinage
- Casein
- Cooked-Curd Cheeses
- Creamery
- Double-Cream Cheese
- Fat Content of Cheeses
- Longhorn Cheese
- Pressed-Curd Cheeses
- Raw Curd Cheeses
- Rennet
- Semi-Cooked Curd Cheeses
- Skim-Milk Cheeses
- Smear-Ripened Cheeses
- Stretched Curd Cheeses
- Sweet Curd Cheeses
- Triple-Cream Cheese
- Truckle
- Turophile
- Washed-Curd Cheeses