I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a desperate salad from ingredients living in unexplored frontiers of my fridge. I have two usual strategies for transforming desperation into salvation: a good dressing and fetta. I know how to make a good dressing but I have no idea how to choose a good fetta. Whenever I’m shopping, looking at a sea of products with radically different textures, labels and prices, I feel as if I’m at the Björk section of the record store. I know there are some hits in there but pick the wrong one and I’ll end up with music completely unsuitable for a dinner party.
To figure it all out, I organised a blind taste test with an Avengers-calibre team of experts – Tiffany Beer (the chair of judges for the Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show); Penny Lawson (professional cheese judge and owner of Penny’s Cheese Shop); Petra Sugiarto (microbiologist and professional cheese judge), Timothy Cassimatis (Greek chef and owner of Olympic Meats) and Alex Grenouiller (owner of Marani Deli). We gathered at Marani Deli in Sydney and tasted 22 cheeses – pretty much anything I could find packaged with the word feta or fetta on it (feta has to be produced from sheep and goats’ milk in Greece, everything else is fetta).
The cheeses were divided into five rounds based on their labels – Greek, Persian, marinated, Danish and other. Here’s a brief guide to help you understand the differences:
Greek or Greek-style: The feta of your expectations. With one notable exception (more below), you can buy any cheese labelled Greek or Greek-style and improve your salad, pastry or last-minute potluck contribution.
Persian: The term and the product are Australian inventions. They’re generally extremely soft and very salted, and because of that they can’t withstand a salad toss or a recipe that requires any subtlety. The better brands, Emporium and Yarra Valley, make good spreads. Because they are neither feta nor, as the taste revealed, a useful substitute for it, the “Persian” fettas have been cut from the fetta rundown below. But if you’re looking for a salty cheese spread, we have included their scores at the end of the article.
Marinated: There are plenty of good products in the wider category of oil and herb marinated soft cheeses (Meredith Dairy is a producer many of our reviewers like) but none of them identify as fetta – I would not recommend the two brands that do.
Danish: Danish fetta is typically smoother, whiter and milder than Greek but, much like in the salami world, in Australian supermarkets “Danish” seems to carry as much meaning as “gourmet”.
Smooth: A few brands make several versions of the same thing: a smooth and a Greek-style. The former are closer to fresh cheeses than the typical salty, acidic feta experience. It’s a perfectly usable product but, like many of the categories above, it’s a different thing.
The best
Dodoni Feta Authentic Greek Cheese P.D.O., 150g, $7.50 ($5 per 100g), available at large supermarkets
Score: 8.5/10
There were no wows when this hit the table, no gasps when it hit our taste buds. Just nods of agreement, as if each person was silently thinking, yep, this is about right. Dodoni’s feta isn’t a masterpiece – you usually need something new or genre-breaking for that. Instead, it is a genre standard. It does everything you need it to do and it does it well. It crumbles predictably; it’s neither dry nor overly wet; it has an acidic, almost lemony edge; it’s evenly seasoned; and, it’s creamy without being oily. The only reviewer who didn’t award this best of the day was me – I gave that honour to South Cape.
The best value
Emporium Selection Greek Style Fetta Cheese, 200g, $2.89 ($1.45 per 100g), available at Aldi
Score: 7/10
There are some lucky people out there who can buy the best-quality things on earth in every category but everyone else has a threshold beyond which they will compromise quality for price. What discount do you need to go from a cheese that ticks every box to one that ticks most boxes? Emporium’s fetta may be a little dry with a fermenty aftertaste, but for the price of Dodoni you can get two of these and change.
The rest
South Cape Greek Style Fetta, 200g, $6.50 ($3.25 per 100g), available at large supermarkets
Score: 7.5/10
I’ve never seen a supermarket product that needs a rebrand more than South Cape. Here we have the most pop culture approach to cheese making, absent of anything countercultural and packed with crowd-pleasing attributes: creamy, salty, lemony, mild and affordable. It’s delicious – I can’t imagine anyone not liking it. Even its Danish fetta is decent. But its products are packaged like just-add-water camp meals, and because of that, I’ve never picked them up. But here I am giving it the top score in a taste test. It’s a bit embarrassing, but at least now I know. South Cape, you deserve my respect, and I hope you get your Brendan Fraser moment.
Lemnos Fetta Traditional, 180g, $6.50 ($3.61 per 100g), available at large supermarkets
Score: 7.5/10
“Not so special but very nice!” wrote one reviewer. It reminded me of a kid who went to my high school. You know, the one who never does anything wrong but never does anything memorable either. It’s probably a boring way to live but it gets you places. So, sorry Lemnos, you’re perfectly pleasant and if we ever do mingle, we’ll probably have a nice time, but I’m not going to think about you again and, frankly, I’d much rather hang out with Brendan Fraser. Weirdly, Lemnos’s smooth and mild iteration has much more character. Reviewers said it tasted like cooked cream and olive brine (it’s very salty) but with an almost cream cheese texture. “Not the worst but very weird,” one reviewer said.
Riverina Dairy Co Greek Style Fetta, 200g, $4.70 ($2.35 per 100g), available at large supermarkets
Score: 6.5/10
If Lemnos is the quiet achiever, Riverina is the handsome but prickly exchange student. It’s rich, sour and oddly spicy – both this version and Riverina’s smooth variety reminded me a lot of rich yoghurt and fermented milk drinks such as ayran, doogh and kefir, which I love (I was interested to see cream listed in the ingredients, the only brand that does). The problem is the texture. It’s solid, dry and chalky, as though it has been mixed with some building material. It’s unlikely to improve a salad but it would be interesting melted into pasta.
Epiros Original Feta, 180g, $8.69 ($4.83 per 100g), available at select grocers
Score: 6.5/10
Epiros sells two Greek fetas: one organic, one not. Both scored 6.5. The regular edition model is decent texturally – soft without being particularly creamy – but it has a bitter edge and a stale aroma, like a cupboard that houses family memorabilia. Like many organic dairy products, the organic iteration feels barnyard-inspired, smelling and tasting as though it was aged where the dairy herds sleep, eat and mate. Both versions are plastered with claims about authenticity and their Greek origin. The non-organic one says: “The most award-winning feta in the world.” I would love to know more about those awards. I’m particularly interested in finding out if they have a food writing category. Maybe my next byline could say “the most award-winning writer in the world”.
The Cheese Board Danish Fetta, 335g, $10.99 ($3.28 per 100g), available at select grocers
Score: 5.5/10
This is a beautiful cheese. It’s whiter than Sofía Vergara’s smile and plump and soft enough to provide comfortable bedding for a small mammal. The texture is exactly as you’d expect from its appearance but, as soon as you try it, all you’ll think about is the nearest water supply. Among all the reviewers, the only notes about the taste were “milky”, “tangy” and “some milky acid notes but overwhelmed by the salt”. I spent the round imagining the people who made this. How many times did they taste it and think, “Nope, that should be saltier”?
Evrofarma Authentic Feta, 200g, $6.99 ($3.50 per 100g), available at select grocers
Score: 5/10
I am fascinated and repulsed by this contestant. The first thing that hit me was a powerful creamy taste, like a savoury, thick dairy concentrate. But that quickly gave way to a worryingly bitter, sour flavour so unusual that more than one reviewer described it as “compost”. I can’t imagine what you’d do with this. Usually, cheese is used to make a salad taste less grassy, not more. It’s the only Greek feta I wouldn’t eat again.
Alba Cheese Fetta, 175g, $6.99 ($3.99 per 100g), available at select grocers
Score: 4/10
Professional cheese judging requires all judges to carry neutral expressions as they eat the cheese. There were no poker faces during this round, just looks of disgust and awe. One of the judges spent the entire round laughing. I spent it confused. Why is this fetta so hard? Why is it astringent? Why can’t I pick up any acidity? How is this even saltier than the Persian and Danish styles we tried? Is it possible to drink too much water? Why is the aftertaste so buttery? One reviewer gave it zero for every category, writing only: “Horrible, tastes like plastic.”
Products cut for brevity:
Riverina Dairy Co Smooth Fetta 7.5/10
Emporium Selection Classic Persian Style Fetta 7.5/10
Yarra Valley Dairy Persian Fetta 7/10
Lemnos Smooth Fetta Mild 6.5/10
Thomas Dux Persian Fetta Cheese 6/10
South Cape Danish Style Fetta 6/10
Binnoire Dairy Hunter Valley Marinated Fetta 5.5/10
Melbourne Cheese Persian Fetta 5/10
Emporium Selection Marinated Fetta 5/10
The Cheese Board Persian Fetta 4.5/10
Emporium Danish Fetta Cheese 4.5/10
