Belgian Cheese on Keto

Belgium doesn’t get enough credit for its cheese. You hear about French cheese, Dutch Gouda, Swiss everything, but the Belgian stuff is genuinely good, and for keto purposes, it’s also convenient. Cheese is fat and protein with minimal carbs. Belgium happens to produce a lot of it and sell it everywhere.

What Belgium actually makes

Herve is the one most people haven’t tried. It’s a washed-rind cheese from the Liège area, soft and pungent, somewhere between a strong brie and something that will clear a room. The flavour is sharp and complex and the carb count is essentially zero. If you can find the aged version, it’s worth it.

Chimay makes cheese as well as beer: the trappist abbey in Hainaut produces several varieties, the most common being a semi-hard orange-rind cheese that you’ll find in most supermarkets. It’s mild, it’s good, and it’s keto-friendly. Orval, the abbey best known for its dry hoppy beer, also produces a pressed cheese that turns up occasionally in better cheese shops. Aged Gouda from just across the Dutch border is easy to find at any Brussels market and gets better the older it is: the really aged stuff develops those crunchy tyrosine crystals and has almost no lactose left.

What to watch out for

The problem isn’t real cheese, it’s everything marketed to look like cheese. Processed cheese slices, the kind that come individually wrapped in plastic, often contain starches, emulsifiers, and added sugars. Fromage à tartiner, the cheese spreads, are frequently padded with fillers. Check the label. Real cheese has a short ingredient list: milk, salt, cultures, rennet. If it has a paragraph of additives, put it back.

Flavoured cheese products are another trap. A plain aged cheese is fine. A “cheese snack” with crackers and dipping sauce is not.

Where to buy decent cheese in Brussels

Delhaize has a reasonable selection, particularly the larger branches. The cheese counter at the Rob in Ixelles is better than a regular supermarket and worth the price difference for anything you’re eating on its own. The fromageries in Ixelles proper (there are a couple on and around Chaussée de Wavre and in the Châtelain neighbourhood) carry a much wider range and the staff actually know what they’re selling. The Marché du Midi on Sunday mornings has cheese stalls, including some decent aged varieties at good prices.

If you’re going to eat cheese regularly on keto, and you probably will, it’s worth knowing one good fromagerie. The difference between a properly aged Herve from a specialist and the supermarket equivalent is significant.

The one thing nobody mentions is that buying a large wedge of decent aged cheese and keeping it in the fridge makes snacking on keto much easier. It sounds obvious but it took me a while to figure out that the solution to afternoon cravings was just to have better cheese available.