Fresh. Buttery. Soapy. Astringent. Enter the world of professional cheese tasting.

MADISON - It's quiet as a group of eight people stand bent at the waist, intently staring at a pizza sitting on a gleaming stainless-steel counter.

It's an early March Wednesday morning, and they are in the Hilmar Cheese Dairy Applications Lab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Dairy Research.

They occasionally look up from the pizza to glance at a poster-sized chart propped on an easel at one end of the counter. It's labeled "Surface Characteristics." There are two rows of pizza pictures on this chart, ranging from raw to overdone and brown. One of the rows is marked "Blister Quantity," the other is "Blister Color," and there are a range of numbers representing the gradients.

After a period of hyper-focused attention, the group of people straighten up and make notations on paper or a tablet.

Welcome to the world of professional cheese tasting, where sensory panelists do a lot more than taste cheese. They scrutinize its color, study its stretchiness and judge its texture inside and outside their mouths.

Their work is used in a variety of applications. It may be used by a graduate student researching highly-technical attributes of cheeses. Or by a producer of frozen pizzas who may be considering a new recipe. Or maybe a pizza maker has added new equipment and wants to ensure quality control. While tasting cheese sounds terrific on the surface, there are aspects of the job that are decidedly unappetizing.

When the Center for Dairy Research posted its opening for these jobs last year, it went viral. Close to home, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked, "Want to be a cheese and pizza taster? UW-Madison has the job for you." Meanwhile, National Public Radio asked, "Is eating cheese on your resume?" There were also stories from the Today show, "Grate Job", and Food & Wine magazine, "This Research Job Will Pay You $15 an Hour to Eat Cheese."

People had a lot of fun with the idea that eating cheese could be job, especially at the highest-profile university in the land of the Cheeseheads. Applications came pouring in by the hundreds, and it's probably safe to say a good proportion of those applying hadn't a clue about what they would be in for if they landed the job.

"It definitely is not sitting around tasting cheeses from around the world," said Kelly Kluck, a sensory panelist who applied and got the job last summer. "That's probably what a lot of people think."

Going on an enriching cheese-tasting journey

Kluck, 58, of Madison, is an elementary school teacher and principal who retired a couple years ago after a 30-year career. Her husband has retired, too, and "we just both got into experimenting with wine, and getting more into wine," she said.

Kluck dove deep into the wine appreciation game, even earning a couple wine-tasting certifications. She reveled in the search for the right cheese to pair with the right wine.

When her husband pointed out a newspaper story about the sensory job, she was more than intrigued. Her first thought, though, was "why would they want me? They will want someone with a food science background or something," Kluck said. "But then I thought about it for a moment. I thought, wait a minute, I'm working on Kelly 2.0 right now. Why wouldn't I? I'm gonna do it."

She soon found herself in an in-depth interview during which she got her first real taste of what the job would be.

"It was a three-hour screening interview with groups," Kluck said. "It was triangulating tastes for bitter and acid and salt; could you identify 16 different aromas and a variety of different tastes across the different taste spectrum."

"I remember leaving the interview and I thought, even if they decided they don't want me, this was the most fun I had in a long time. I'm like, I found my calling. I was like, where has this been all my life? I loved it so much."

'I love, love, love, love cheese!'

Most people's experience with food is a blending of art and science, with the scale tilted heavily toward art. When a regular person eats food, she is likely most concerned with how it tastes. Is it delicious? Or just all right? The science part might come from concerns about what the food does for a body and health, its nutrients and calories and so on.

A sensory panelist concentrates on the science of cheese and other dairy products. The taster's job is not to determine whether the cheese tastes good, but describes in detail how it tastes. It takes a special kind of concentration and focus, and an understanding of the words that best communicate flavor.

"We want them to be as much like machines as possible," said Brandon Prochaska, the sensory coordinator for the Center for Dairy Research.

For Kluck, drilling down into the science of taste has been a sensory adventure. "Oh, it's so much fun," she said. "I can't wait to come into work."

Kluck carries a binder stuffed with definitions, taste profiles and other reference materials that aid sensory panelists.

Many of those descriptors don't sound fun, or even appetizing. For example, some of the attributes associated with cheeses includes things such as "bitter" and "sulphur." There's also "goaty," "soapy," "musty" and "barny/cowy." How about "waxy," "ammonia" and "chemical"?

All those tastes, however, might be overcome by those on the other end of the spectrum: "buttery," "sweet" and "fresh."

As much as she loves the work, there are downsides to the job.

"Sometimes at the end of a session, I feel very salt saturated," Kluck said. "I can tell I have had too much sodium. So I try to counteract it with eating greens or fresh fruit or vegetables."

Other times, Kluck will walk out the lab and "I don't think I'll want another piece of cheese or pizza for a while. But honestly, the next day I'm like, where's the cheese? Where's the pizza? I'm ready."

Overall, the sensory job has enriched Kluck's appreciation of food and drink. "I feel more dialed in when I'm eating now," she said. "And I appreciate all the different things that I'm eating or drinking."

And it has done nothing to diminish Kluck's zest for cheese: "I love, love, love, love cheese!"

Get started in amateur cheese tasting

The Center for Dairy Research regularly holds consumer taste tests that allow people who haven't gone through sensory training to give their opinions in cheese tasting tests, Prochaska said.

The next consumer taste test will be held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. April 2 at the center in Babcock Hall, 1605 Linden Drive, Madison. The program will ask people to try a variety of samples of cheddar cheese. Participants receive a $10 gift card for their efforts. Participants must be 18 years old or older and have eaten cheddar cheese during the last three months. To learn more, email sensory@cdr.wisc.edu.

Keith Uhlig is a regional features reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin based in Wausau. Contact him at 715-845-0651 or kuhlig@gannett.com. Follow him at @UhligK on X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram or on Facebook.