Cheese plane lovers of the world, unite! I am certainly in the cult. I love the silky feel of a paper-thin slice and all the aroma released by the blade. Alas, this genius implement, invented by a Norwegian carpenter almost a century ago, is not universally appreciated. You won’t find a cheese plane in many French, Italian, Spanish or Swiss kitchens, but the Norwegians and the Dutch make up for that.

“The last time we researched, the average Dutch household owns 2.7 cheese planes,” Martijn Bos of Boska, the cheese tool company, told me in an e-mail. I’m above average.

Norwegian carpenter Thor Bjørklund was frustrated that he couldn’t cut a nice piece of cheese with a kitchen knife. So he started playing around with his workshop tools and discovered that a planer achieved the results he wanted. He patented his design in 1925 and began manufacturing his invention in Lillehammer two years later. Since then the company he started has produced more than 50 million cheese slicers.

The design has changed little over the years, although Boska, which managed Bjørklund’s export sales for decades, has developed a coating and a quilted surface to keep the cheese from sticking to the plane. “The Monaco+ plane is the best of the best,” says Bos. In 2018 it won a Red Dot Award, a major international design prize.

I like to use a plane on firm cheeses like Swiss alpine cheeses (that’s Le Maréchal in the image above), Comté and some of the silky aged sheep cheeses like Ossau-Iraty. The texture as the sheet dissolves on my tongue is so pleasing, and I have the impression that I’m getting more aroma.

To confirm that, I checked in with Harold McGee, author of Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells and a fellow cheese enthusiast. These days, he uses his cheese plane mostly to slice cucumbers but he does love his girolle, the tool used to shave Tête de Moine into frilly rosettes.

“From looking at what scant literature there is on flavor perception with cheese, my guess is that probably it helps release aromatics earlier than if you had a solid piece,” says McGee. “But if the aroma comes earlier, it’s also probably going to go earlier. ”

McGee says flavor is released when saliva mixes with fat as the cheese is breaking down. Aromas are largely fat soluble so they’re locked in until we get the cheese in our mouth. The unlocking happens more quickly with a broad sheet than with a thick chunk. Still, not everyone is on board.

“We do not really use this tool,” confirmed Caroline Hostettler, a Swiss cheese importer and Switzerland native, in an e-mail. The Swiss want substantial slices, not slivers. Hostettler told me she spent the summer before college in Norway and saw cheese planes “in every kitchen drawer and on every cheese board.” She brought some home as gifts but says most of them are probably still in their boxes.

In the Netherlands, cheese planes are not just for cheese, says Bos. The Dutch use them for slivering asparagus, slicing cucumbers (for their gin-and-tonics) and shaving chocolate for topping bread. Gotta try that.

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