You know, I’ve never really given the melting point of cheese a huge amount of thought. Until now, that is.

It started with the runny camembert experiment. Having recently discussed the ethics of using a microwave to encourage camembert into a state of runniness, I just had to try it out for myself. I was quite surprised that no more than a few seconds worth of exposure to those micro-waves was enough to reduce a formerly upstanding wedge of camembert to utter gloop.

Not long thereafter, and clearly being in a dairy products frame of mind, I decided to have a snack of some fried halloumi cheese. This cheese from Cyprus, made from a mixture of goat’s, sheep’s and sometimes cow’s milk, is salty (somewhat like feta) but has a texture more like mozzarella. It’s very much at the other end of the melting spectrum from camembert and its high melting point means that it’s very suitable for grilling and frying, as the slices retain their shape, despite the heat of the pan. If you’ve not tried halloumi (and can get your hands on it), it’s delicious fried in butter until golden and splashed with some lemon juice.

In between camembert and halloumi, there are, of course, a myriad of other cheeses, all with varying degrees of meltability. Towards the solid end of the scale, I think of chunks of paneer in Indian curries, while that ultimate expression of melted cheese, the fondue, is likely to have gruyere and emmental swishing about in the mix. My favourite quattro formaggi pizza would have little islands of melty gorgonzola and ricotta merging into the mozzarella and all dressed with a coating of grated parmesan that just seems to go straight to the golden crusty stage in the heat of the oven. And last, but not least, there’s the humble cheese-on-toast. While there are as many variations of cheese-on-toast as there are cheeses and breads (a la Mrs Marv’s recent Grilled Cheese Manifesto), we generally want something that’s going to melt without too much encouragement and, yes, cheddar fits the bill nicely, among many others.