Tête de Moine, a semi-hard Swiss cheese that often finds its way onto charcuterie boards and salads, not only brings a rich, nutty and creamy flavor, but also adds a dramatic flare to the presentation. Instead of slicing, this cheese is shaved into delicate rosettes using a tool called a Girolle whose rotating blade gently scrapes thin layers of cheese into ruffled curls. These pretty cheese flowers are known to enhance the flavor and texture due to their high surface-to-volume ratio.

The unusual way Tête de Moine forms wrinkles when shaved, piqued the interest of a team of physicists who, in a study published in Physical Review Letters, set out to investigate the physical mechanisms behind these intricate shapes.

Similar morphogenetic patterns can be observed in the frilly edges of leaves, fungi, corals, or even torn plastic sheets, but the mechanisms that explain the similar shapes in these materials fail to account for the distinctive physical properties of cheese.

This study discovered that the frilly shapes arise as a result of variations in the cheese’s properties—such as firmness and elasticity—within a single Tête de Moine wheel, from the center to the edge. The distinctive flower shape is driven mainly by changes in friction caused by the cheese’s inhomogeneous texture and not by variations in mechanical properties like yield stress or fracture energy.

A typical Girolle has a wooden base, a central steel spike, and a removable rotating blade with a handle attached to it. Before serving, the cheese is skewered onto a steel rod until it reaches the wooden base, and then the rotating blade that sits on the cheese is mounted onto the rod. Rotating the blade’s handle scrapes off thin layers of the frilly cheese.

For this study, the researchers opted for cheese wheels from a single brand and age was used to maintain consistency. They also modified the Girolle to include: a motorized base of the Girolle to rotate the cheese at a steady speed of 1.14 rad/s, the blade at a fixed height and a tilt of −14.7° to ensure consistent slicing and adjustable weights to control the vertical cutting force precisely.

To understand the physical forces behind the cheese’s unique shape, the team measured key properties like depth of cut, mechanical properties such as Young’s modulus, yield stress, and fracture energy, as well as the friction coefficient at various positions on the cheese wheel.

They also integrated steady, real-time imaging into the setup, capturing side-view snapshots of the cutting process. This allowed them to visually confirm the cutting mechanism and observe how the cheese curls formed along the wheel’s edge.

The experiments revealed that the cheese flowers form due to inhomogeneous plastic contraction during scraping, not from elastic deformation.

As the cheese wheel ages, it matures at different rates in different areas—the core remains softer while the edge becomes harder. This results in varying friction across the wheel, with much greater contraction in the inner core region of the cheese flower, leading to its characteristic buckling and frilly shape.

This was further confirmed by the observation that removing the low-friction outer layer produced flat and non-frilly cheese slices.

The researchers highlight that the shaping mechanism presented in this study could help develop new tools for the controlled processing of soft materials and enable the design of complex forms through a simple scraping technique.

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