It's me again, Greek cheesemaker. You can't eat feta the morning you make it! At that point it's not even cheese, just slightly compressed and dehydrated curd. You have to wait at least three months until that curd tastes and smells like feta. For feta to develop its character it has to be aged for at least that long in brine, preferrably in wooden barrels that allow the characteristic surface cultures to grow.
You can eat myzithra the day you make feta, myzithra being a whey cheese that is traditionally made with the whey left over from making feta, and typically served at the dinner table of the cheesemaker's family. Now, fresh myzithra is a heavenly thing to eat and most people indeed will not be able to experience it, until they have the necessary connections to a handsome and intelligent Greek cheesemaker :P But you can buy even myzithra at the supermarket, thanks to the wonders of modern refrigeration technology.
Why are you saying that feta must be eaten fresh? I think you're mixing it up with myzithra, or some other cheese that's usually eaten fresh. Myzithra, or anthotyro, look very much like feta, and even have similar taste, since they're made from the same milk, and (if you make it the traditional way) by the same person as the feta.
> On the other hand.. it's blocking access to feta cheese to all of Europe. Feta cheese only keeps for maybe a day and there's no efficient way to get it from Greece to European supermarkets before it's turned. Now that we finally have super fresh food in our supermarkets, feta cheese stands out in that it's simply impossible to get fresh outside of Greece.
I'm sorry but that is not right. I'm Greek and I make cheese, although feta is not my specialty. Feta can last for weeks in the refrigerator, and it can be aged for a year or more before it is sent to market. Perhaps you are thinking of a different Greek cheese? There are some varieties of anthotyro (a whey cheese, made as a byproduct of making feta and other Greek cheeses) that do not last very long. But, the general rule is that with modern refrigeration technology most cheese, from most countries, can travel around Europe without trouble.
"Fresh" feta is also a bit of a misconception. Traditionally, feta is aged in wooden barrels, in 18 degrees Celsius. In modern days, market forces limit the aging period to the absolute minimum of three months, but you can still find plenty of traditional producers who age their feta for a lot longer. When we're talking about cheese, "fresh" refers more to the taste and organoleptic characteristics of the product, rather than how soon it is consumed after production. So three-month old feta cheese will often be referred to as "fresh" even if it's ... three months old.
In my understanding, what really blocked "access to feta cheese to all of Europe" was, for a long time, the production of cheese called "feta" by French, German and Danish companies, who made "feta" with cheap, industrially bred cow's milk, until the PDO for Greek feta was established. Those inferior "feta" cheeses confused European consumers, for whom after all feta is not a tradition and they can't be expected to know what feta is supposed to be like, and contrived to keep the real stuff out of the European market.
Of course, if you ask me, the kind of fully PDO feta that can be found in most European markets today is not much better than the cow's milk "feta" made by those non-Greek producers, even if it's made in Greece and while (nominally) respecting the PDO regulations, but that's another, and vary painful discussion. Suffice it to say that adulteration of milk for feta with cow's milk bought in the cheap from other Balkan countries is a thing.
You can eat myzithra the day you make feta, myzithra being a whey cheese that is traditionally made with the whey left over from making feta, and typically served at the dinner table of the cheesemaker's family. Now, fresh myzithra is a heavenly thing to eat and most people indeed will not be able to experience it, until they have the necessary connections to a handsome and intelligent Greek cheesemaker :P But you can buy even myzithra at the supermarket, thanks to the wonders of modern refrigeration technology.
Why are you saying that feta must be eaten fresh? I think you're mixing it up with myzithra, or some other cheese that's usually eaten fresh. Myzithra, or anthotyro, look very much like feta, and even have similar taste, since they're made from the same milk, and (if you make it the traditional way) by the same person as the feta.