Cheese - Where are all the good bits?

The best bits of hard cheese are the white specks that sparkle on the tongue and make you ratchet up to the next price or age range, and give your cheese maker more of your money.

These tasty white specks on aged cheese are the result of enzymes and other interesting things acting on complex fats that are broken down into free fatty acids. Whatever "free fatty acids"are.

I'll let you know if they turn out to be important, but compared to how important cheese is, I'm guessing they rank a distant second at best, so this is probably the last you will hear of them from me.

The result is these little crystalline bursts of awesomeness that you can see distributed around in cheeses like parmesan.

They are delicious.

Go and open the fridge or climb down into your celler now and have a look.

Better yet dig out all the crystalline bits and eat them all, and see what I mean.

Nobody else in your house will mind.

I'll wait.

See how absurdly delicious they are?

So....

It turns out these crystals of goodness form over time as the cheese drys from the outside in. As a result, you should buy cheese from the outside of a round rather than the inside, as even though the entire cheese is the same age, the cheese on the inside hasn't "aged" as much.

Probably to do with it drying or it's exposure to air or something.

It doesn't matter. Buy the stuff nearest the rind, and nearest to the outside of the round.

But my question is...

Why dont they just make parmesan with a hole through the middle like a doughnut to allow the air into the centre?

120ThingsIn20Years is eating cheese, and thinks it should be even better.

Cheese - Reasonable cheese brining

This part 3 of reasonable cheese will see me treating the outer layer of the cheese to form a skin or rind.

I successfully made my Reasonable Cheese, and eventually pressing it into shape and a cheese-like consistency. The next step was to stop it going rotten. From what I can tell, there appears to be a few different ways of doing this including doing nothing at all, waxing, salting, soaking in brine, rubbing with vinegar, or simply eating it right away.

I chose brining.

First I created a saturated salt solution. I mixed salt into water until I could mix no more. It turned out to be around 200g of salt in 800ml of hot water.

I left it to cool, then added my Reasonable Cheese to sit overnight in the brine.

Ten hours later I discovered a thing that looked a lot like a cheese.











Now I wait. And wait. For between two and six months.

I'm not sure if this cheese worked or not yet. It seems like it may have, but there is no way for the novice to have any real clue as to the success or otherwise of this project for months to come.

This cheese was quite complicated to make and required some specialist equipment. There was a lot to learn, and still is a lot to learn. One major concern I have is the size of the cheese. A small cheese will turn to a small cheese rind before its even ready to eat. I suspect that's why a lot of small cheeses are waxed. ie To prevent them drying out. The first cheese I attempted is already more of a cheese rind than a cheese.

I will make more of this kind, or similar table cheese, but will do so with a great deal more planning and some more equipment. I will also make much bigger cheeses and more of them. I think, to be practical, a batch of cheese would need to be made with more like twenty or thirty litres of milk rather than four litres. There is also the issue of cost. Unless this cheese turns out to be very special indeed, it will have cost much more than it will be worth. Having said that, I am now in possession of the only cheese of its kind. And the last piece of it at that. Effectively an almost un-reproducible, and thus priceless cheese by any standard.

Or not.

Only a great deal of time will tell.