Cheese A Day: aging

Cheese Makers Forum FAQ Equipment part 1 Equipment part 2 History

Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts

Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Cellaring Conundrum

In texts that I've read about aging cheese, I seriously have read the recomendation, "Put them in your cave."

To use a bit of internet slang, WTF?

Who in the United States has a cave? Who in the United States still even has a root cellar (I'm sure you exist, but you're pretty uncommon)? So, since I do not have an extra fridge at the moment to retrofit, I've been doing it the manual way, which is to keep them in the fridge for 12 hours, then take them out for 12 hours.

This is far from ideal. I am pretty sure that this may cause defects or off flavors, but I think it is a better compromise then the alternatives:

Leave all the loaves at room temperature, which may cause the acidity and harsh flavors to run rampant
Leave all the loaves in the fridge, which I suspect won't allow for much flavor development at all
Put the loaves in the cold barn, where they will be over run by ants
Cellar the loaves in the garage, where my lovely dog will certainly find and consume them

So at the moment I don't have a huge amount of options. I have contemplated digging a mini-cellar where I can place a sealable bucket of some sort, but frankly it is so rainy right now I hardly want to go outside.

Anyone have any suggestions?

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Cheese A Day by Jeremy Pickett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at cheeseaday.blogspot.com.

Kicking and Screaming into the Kitchen
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