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Professional Chefs Blindly Taste Test Cheese | Test Kitchen Talks | Bon Appétit

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The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen puts its most trusted palates on the line, blindfolds and all.

In Test Kitchen Talks, Bon Appétit’s video series built around the culinary staff’s off-camera banter and expertise, editors and chefs sit down for a blind cheese tasting with no labels, no visual cues, and nothing to go on but taste, smell, and texture. The premise is simple and a little cruel: hand someone a cube of cheese, blindfold them, and see if their palate is as good as they claim.

• Test Kitchen staffers are blindfolded and handed cheese varieties spanning different textures and flavor profiles, tasked with naming each one using only taste and smell.
• Deputy food editor Chris Morocco enters as the presumptive favorite, having built a reputation across Bon Appétit’s programming — including his sensory-reconstruction series — as the Test Kitchen’s most exacting palate.
• The episode plays out as a friendly intra-kitchen competition, tracking whether Morocco backs up his reputation or another staffer takes the top score.

Inside the Blind Test

The format strips away every visual shortcut a chef normally relies on. There’s no rind to inspect, no color to clock, no crumb structure to eyeball — just a blindfolded taster working through smell, texture on the tongue, and whatever flavor memory they can summon on the spot. That’s the entire point of Test Kitchen Talks as a series: it takes people who cook for a living and forces them to rely on the one sense that supposedly separates a professional from an amateur.

Watching the staff talk through each sample is where the episode earns its charm. Someone identifies a sharp tang and immediately overthinks it; someone else nails a texture read in half a second and second-guesses themselves anyway. The back-and-forth feels less like a scripted format and more like a genuine kitchen argument, which is exactly the tone that’s made this kind of viral, low-production food content stick with audiences across trending web video in recent years.

Chris Morocco’s Reputation on the Line

Morocco doesn’t walk into this test as a neutral participant — he walks in as the guy everyone expects to win. Across Bon Appétit’s channel, he’s become known for a palate precise enough to anchor an entire series built on rebuilding dishes from taste alone, and that reputation follows him into every blind test the Test Kitchen runs.

The Test Kitchen crew got it right only about half the time.

That’s the tension the episode leans on: does the guy with the reputation actually perform, or does the blindfold level the field? Bon Appétit doesn’t hide the ball on this — it’s baked into the setup, with the video practically daring viewers to bet against him.

Test Kitchen Staff Analyzes Bites

The staff doesn’t just guess — they narrate their process, which is what makes the format work as entertainment and not just a party trick. A cube gets identified as sharp and crumbly before anyone even bites into it, based on smell alone. A creamy, buttery texture gets flagged instantly as something in the brie family. A pungent, sharp bite gets called out as blue cheese before the taster even finishes chewing.

That kind of real-time sensory breakdown is the whole appeal of this style of video content, the sort of format that’s turned casual internet challenges into a genre of their own across web-first entertainment. It’s low-stakes by design, but the chefs treat it like a real test — because for people whose careers run on their palate, it kind of is.

By the end, the accuracy rate lands right around the coin-flip mark, and that’s the whole joke of the episode — a room full of professional cooks getting cheese wrong nearly as often as they get it right, blindfolds on, egos slightly bruised.