borrowed from Spanish, "cheese," going back to Latin cāseus — more at cheese entry 1.

Mexican cuisine features two main variations of white cheese. queso blanco, traditionally made from cow's milk, and queso fresco ( Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkeso ˈfɾesko]), which may include a combination of cow's and goat's milk.

Is queso spicy? As with salsa, there's a range of spice-levels available for queso. It's possible to buy or make very mild queso that doesn't have any more heat than a block of cheese. It's also possible to get super spicy queso that can melt your taste buds off.

Cheese, as well as the Spanish queso and German Kaese and a few other cheese words, all can be traced to the Latin word for cheese, caseus. Going back a little further, the earliest known proto-Indo-European root is *kwat-, a term that refers to the process of making cheese as it means “to ferment, to become sour.”