Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart / Target / Walmart
Cheap cheese is a refrigerator essential. When you mindlessly walk to the kitchen for a little treat even though you aren’t that hungry, cheap cheese is there for you. Expensive cheese is for impressing company and for cooking that New York Times recipe you screenshot before the paywall blocked you; cheap cheese is for eating guilt-free in front of the open fridge door, stuffing in your mouth before you rush to work with no breakfast in your stomach, and making cheap cheese boards when actually cooking just isn’t in the cards.
From American to Swiss, we’ve tried a lot of cheese to find the best cheese at the grocery store—but the best of the best isn’t always budget friendly. We went back through all of our rankings and picked out cheeses that were tasty enough to make our rankings. (Oh
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A lot of the best cheap cheese we’ve found in our taste tests comes from Aldi, like this non smoked provolone. It’s squeaky and creamy tasting and melts like a dream. It doesn’t have the sharpness or complexity of the other best provolone cheeses, but it’s simple and straightforward, and we love that. This is going to make a damn comforting bologna and cheese sandwich on some squishy white bread with mayo.
A great thing about taco night? The ingredients are affordable and when you combine them, they all taste really, really good. This shredded taco cheese from Walmart, the best cheap cheese we tried in our Mexican blend cheese taste test, ensures you never run the risk of eating a bland taco or quesadilla. It’s a pleasant mix of finely shredded cheddar and monterey jack cheeses, but the secret weapon here? Taco seasoning right there in the mix. It’s the best cheap cheese if you want to make anything you eat taste like tacos—and why wouldn’t you want that?
A good snacking cheese is worth its weight in gold, even if it’s cheap cheese like these colby jack cubes from Aldi. They’re fun and easy to eat—seriously, why don’t more foods come cubed?—not to mention creamy with a pleasant pop of tang. This is the best cheap cheese to eat on the go or to make the world’s easiest cheap cheese boards for game night. Roll up some cold cuts and you’re set!
You should always have a bag of shredded mozzarella in the fridge. Making a simple dinner of pasta and sauce? Melt some mozz on it and—boom—it’s fancy baked pasta. Have some flour tortillas and red sauce? Welp, now you have individual pizzas. This shredded mozzarella from Target isn’t just some of the best cheap cheese we’ve tasted, it’s kinda fancy, too. In addition to finely shredded mozzarella, this blend has some parm in the mix, which adds some nuttiness and saltiness to the neutral creaminess of the mozzarella. This took the #2 spot in our best shredded mozzarella cheese ranking, which makes it some of the best cheap cheese, hands down.
Frigo is probably best known for making string cheese with a weird little anthropomorphic string cheese mascot on the packaging, but don’t snooze on their feta. No, it isn’t Greek feta, but these crumbles have a lot of virtues, including a salty bite on the finish and a lot of creaminess up front. This is the best cheap cheese to sprinkle on a pizza or salad loaded up with kalamata olives.
Gwynedd Stuart, Sporked’s managing editor, is an L.A.-based writer and editor who spends way, way too much time at the grocery store. She’s never met an Old El Paso taco or mozzarella stick she didn’t like.
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