Is Blue Cheese Gluten-Free?

Not all cheeses are as innocent as they look. Some crumble politely over salads, others hide a complex backstory within their veins. For gluten-free eaters, there's one in particular that deserves a second glance. If you love blue cheese and you're trying to stay gluten-free, it's important to understand when blue cheese is safe, and why it might not always be. The answer is actually a bit tricky and may depend on personal sensitivity and risk-assessment.

For those new to following a gluten-free lifestyle, the first steps are understanding what gluten is and identifying what foods contain gluten. Gluten is a protein found in common grains like wheat, barley, and rye. Knowing that, it's pretty easy to conscientiously avoid the obvious culprits: bread, pasta, pastries, etc., but it actually gets a lot more granular than that. Gluten often hides in fermented foods and is also found in processed items where you wouldn't expect it, like salad dressings and even imitation crab. In these cases, gluten isn't there for flavor but for its structure: Gluten helps stabilize, stretch, or bulk up ingredients in ways that are hard to replicate with gluten-free ingredients.

Blue cheese: that moody, marbled wedge of myths that smells like it has some strong opinions, cools down hot wings in dressing form, sharpens a wedge salad, and brings unexpected complexity to jalapeño cornbread. It's a little funky, a little fancy, and it hasn't always had the cleanest reputation among the gluten-sensitive. Despite its bold and enigmatic personality, blue cheese is usually gluten-free, or at least mostly gluten-free, with some careful caveats for the cautious celiacs, similar to how there's a difference between gluten-free and gluten-friendly.

To determine whether blue cheese is gluten-free, it helps to understand what it is, how it's made, and where it comes from. Blue cheese is not a whole food that is grown, harvested, and sold as is. It's processed: a fermented product traditionally made from cow, sheep, or goat's milk, which is curdled and salted, then inoculated with penicillium mold cultures, which grow veins of blue or green mold through the cheese as it ages. Here's where things get a little sticky, and maybe a little gluten-y: Historically, those mold cultures came from a wheat or rye substrate, as told in the French Roquefort legend.

While today's large, commercial production usually relies on lab-grown cultures, eliminating the cross-contamination concern, not every blue cheese maker follows the same method. On the spectrum between mild and stinky, from industrial crumbles sitting under a sneeze guard at a strip mall salad bar to raw-milk wedges aged in caves by small producers, there's wide variation in blue cheese, and with it, different risk levels for gluten contamination.

Some regional blue cheeses, like Roquefort, Stilton, or Gorgonzola, are produced under strict controls that regulate how they're made but not necessarily their gluten contact. Others are even more rustic, using heirloom methods that blur modern labeling guidelines. In the world of artisan cheeses, some techniques go as far as using live insect fermentation, as in Sardinia's infamous Casu Marzu cheese, proving just how far methods can differ. Traditional methods, like culturing mold on rye bread, are still used by some producers, like the renowned French producer Roquefort Carles, which makes its own rye bread in-house. 

The potential bread-based medium raises valid concerns about gluten contamination, especially for people with celiac disease, who can be super sensitive to even molecular levels of gluten present in their food. For gluten-sensitive consumers, navigating blue cheese options often means doing extra research. While producers are responsible for disclosing ingredients and methods, it's ultimately up to the individual to ask the right questions, especially when label information is limited. 

The truly committed celiacs know to do their homework and, sometimes, even contact manufacturers directly. While the FDA considers products with less than 20 parts per million of gluten to be "gluten-free," no one's regulating blue cheese for gluten that microscopic. If the mold was once cultured on rye six steps back in the process, it likely won't show up on the label, but it might still matter.