Classroom lesson · Food · 🇳🇴 Norway

Brunost - Norway's brown cheese

A sweet, caramel-coloured cheese sliced thin on toast

A slice of brunost on a slice of bread, with a Norwegian cheese slicer beside it

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Brunost (which means 'brown cheese' in Norwegian) is one of the most famous foods in Norway. It is sweet, soft, fudgy and the colour of caramel. Most Norwegian children grow up eating it sliced thin on top of bread or waffles for breakfast.

Tell me more

Brunost was invented in a Norwegian valley called Gudbrandsdalen in the 1860s by a farmer's daughter called Anne Hov. To make it, you boil up the whey - the leftover watery liquid from making normal cheese - until the natural milk sugars slowly turn brown and caramelise. Then it sets into a firm, fudgy block.

Because the milk sugars caramelise, brunost tastes a bit sweet, almost like a fudge with a slight cheesy tang. It is unlike any cheese in the rest of the world. Visitors to Norway often try it and don't know what to make of it.

Brunost is so famous in Norway that it comes with its own special tool: the 'ostehøvel', or cheese slicer. It is a thin metal wedge with a slot in it. Norwegians invented it in 1925 because brunost is too soft and sticky to slice with a knife. Today, the cheese slicer is used all over the world.

On a typical Norwegian breakfast, you'll see open slices of bread with butter, brunost shaved on top, and sometimes a spoonful of strawberry jam. It is also brilliant melted over a waffle, with a little blob of cream.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01How can a cheese taste sweet? What does that tell us about milk?
  2. 02What is a food in your home that visitors from other countries sometimes find surprising?
  3. 03The cheese slicer was invented just to slice this one kind of cheese. What other tools have been invented for just one purpose?
Try this

Classroom activity

List your class's typical breakfast foods. Now list a typical Norwegian breakfast: bread, brunost, jam, sometimes herring, sometimes porridge. Compare. What would feel strangest about swapping breakfasts for a day?