Comfortable room temperature for most people is around 10 degrees above that range—and, of course, temperature inside your space can fluctuate greatly depending on the weather and the time of year. The vast majority of cheesemakers today—around 75 percent, according to the Oxford Companion to Cheese —mature their cheeses on wooden boards.
Wood has been used as a material for making and aging cheese for millennia—long before people understood the science behind why it made for great cheese. Wood helps maintain humidity in a space without building up condensation on its surface. It can also be cleaned and sanitized easily and then inoculated with the desired cultures, helping the cheese to mature properly and warding off potential pathogens. The design of the Cheese Grotto was developed with these factors in mind.
In addition to looking beautiful and doubling as cheese boards , its wooden shelves help to maintain the proper moisture levels for the cheeses inside. Hundreds of years ago, the farm wife or dairy maid—as cheesemaking was the province of women on the farm—would have cleaned her wooden cheesemaking implements with coarse salt and left them in the sun to dry.
All you have to do is give your Grotto a cleaning with hot water and vinegar every three months to keep it working well and looking great for years to come. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply to add an extra layer of protection to the cheeses in your refrigerator. Storing well-wrapped cheeses in a plastic food storage tub loosely covered with a lid will help protect them from the drying air of your refrigerator. You can also try aging cheeses this way, increasing humidity by placing a piece of damp paper towel at one end of the container and placing the container in the warmest part of your fridge.
But the lower temperature means that the cheese will take longer to age. Another way to store cheese is with the Cheese Grotto. Its wood construction and humidifying clay block provide the right level of moisture for cheeses to be aged or stored. Keep it on the counter and your favorite wheels and wedges will always be the perfect temperature for eating—no more waiting an hour between your cheese craving and digging in for the best flavor and texture. And a bat cave to linger in until they're ready to emerge fully formed.
Murray's, the iconic Greenwich Village cheesemonger, has been aging their own cheeses since when they first built a modest square-foot aging facility under their Bleecker Street store.
In Europe, cheese was traditionally aged and preserved in actual caves before the advent of refrigeration. Several styles are still produced this way, most prominently Roquefort, which according to EU law must be aged in southern France's Roquefort-sur-Soulzon caves. Modern aging caves are what you see in the US, and excluding those built by cheesemakers solely to age their own products, there are only a few caves in the U.
Some caves take entirely fresh cheeses from cheesemakers and age them from start to finish; other cheesemakers start aging cheeses themselves and let the caves finish them off. Murray's caves are the oldest in the country. The overall guiding philosophy at the Murray's Caves, as described by Cavemaster Brian Ralph, is to take cheeses that arrive with "one note" and impart them with considerably more depth of flavor, like curing fresh pork legs into ham or fermenting grape juice into wine.
Inside the lime-washed cinderblock caves, bacterial cultures accumulate in visible lines, not unlike the decades-worth of soot and spice that line old meat smokers. And like smoking meat and making wine, aging cheese is no cakewalk.
It's a time- and labor-intensive process that demands fanatical devotion to detail as well as considerable skill and patience. Brian's a former neurobiologist, and his assistant, Peter Jenkelunas, has a master's in food science. Brian explained just what happens when a cheese ages in a cave. Some cheeses are aged externally, meaning bacteria and mold cultures on the surface of the cheese age it "from the outside in.
With externally ripened cheeses, "mold or bacteria that cover the surface of the cheese digest their food by breaking down proteins and fats with enzymes," Brian explains. Different molds and bacteria use different enzymes and release different flavors and aromas into the cheese.
Brian first leads me to a room replete with cleaning supplies and white clinical clothing that wouldn't look out of place in a hospital. To enter the caves, employees and guests must wash their hands, don lab coats, rubber boots, hairnets, and beardnets most fashionable item of all ; thoroughly scrub the boots with soap and solvent; and sign a form agreeing to the guest policy, which is mostly a list of personal hygiene regulations.
All the fuss is to ensure that the cave aging process, which depends entirely on a tightly-controlled microbial ecosystem, isn't contaminated in any way. Among the instructions:. The facility is generally not open to the public, and the strict rules are only in place for employees and the rare occasions when visitors are allowed in. Different styles of cheese require vastly different mold cultures, temperatures, amounts of time, and moisture levels to age properly; you can't age a month-old Brie in the same room as a year-old Cheddar.
The Bloomy Rind Cave is for soft-ripened cheeses like Brie that age from the outside in. Mold cultures from the cheesemaking process develop and mature on the rind of young, or "green" cheeses, then work their way inward. Given the short aging period and fragile nature of soft-ripened cheeses, Brian pays special attention to the temperature and humidity inside the Bloomy Rind Cave, which is kept slightly cooler and drier than the other caves.
Lower humidity and cooler temperature ensure that the mold cultures don't Hulk out and grow too quickly. If they do, the cheeses will overripen and fall apart in a catastrophic process known as rind slippage, where the cheese slips off its rind like a snake shedding a layer of skin. You can tell a properly aged bloomy rind cheese by the presence of a distinct creamline: A thin, gooey layer between the rind and the cheese that oozes just slightly when you cut it.
That creamline is the result of enzymes on the rind digesting the proteins that bind the cheese's fat together, leaving a looser layer of dairy behind. The first is not to let too much moisture build up inside on the cover and drip onto the cheeses. If you see moisture condensing on the lid or collecting in the bottom , make sure you wipe it off when turning the cheese. You do not want a wet surface to develop or mold may become a serious problem.
Also when using these for soft ripened and high moisture cheeses that continue to drain for several days, pay close attention to the moisture build up.
Mats should also be used in these boxes to keep the cheese off of the bottom surface to allow them to breathe and keep away from excessive moisture. Since the volume of air in these boxes is somewhat limited, they should be opened frequently to exchange the gases produced by ripening for fresh air, especially with higher moisture young cheeses. In when my wife Robin and I set about re-doing our kitchen remodeling with bulldozer! The new cave would be isolated from the heating system of the house by about 30" of granite note the thickness of the granite wall in photo to the right and another 10" of cement and the ceiling with about 10" of insulation and a vapor barrier.
The new cave would be primarily cooled by the ground temp but in mid winter a small heater is needed to keep it above 50F and during mid-summer an air conditioner is needed to keep it below 60F. This means a bit of seasonal fluctuation and this would have been normal in a traditional cave. In the future if I do want to keep the upper temperature more in the F range, I will use a small compressor and an evaporative loop to do this.
This smaller room is the 'Cave' and where my cheeses age quite well. I have left the north wall of this room as bare unfinished concrete. During July and August I need to use an air conditioner in the larger room to keep it down in the upper 50s and during late January a small heater in the cave to keep it at 52F.
The 'Cave', holding at a perfect 'cellar temperature' of is ideal for my serving kegs of beer which get forced by CO2 directly up to taps on the kitchen wall. The larger room is also a great place to store my beer and wines and during the winter it holds stable at a constant 48F from November to April and is the perfect fermentation temperature for my lagers. In addition to all of this it is a great root cellar for vegetables and home canned goods.
All in all it is a pretty good traditional system. Those that have been here for workshops can attest to that. As you enter the cave notice the insulated door in which I have used a large sheet of urethane, sandwiched between 2 plywood panels. The cave itself is actually quite small but offers plenty of space along 3 walls for shelves and just enough room between them to work. The temperature and humidity are very important to the successful aging of the cheese.
I find it essential to have at least one or 2 of these hygrometers around to monitor this. The shelves I use here are a mix of pine and ash. These 2 materials I find to work quite well and are easy to keep clean. Other woods such as oak and maple are somewhat problematic in that they stain the cheeses. Also note the spacing between and behind cheese for proper air movement. I also keep a good distance between shelves to accommodate moving and handling the cheeses.
Several times a year I remove, scrub, and air dry the shelves in the sun This is quite effective in keeping unwanted mold under control and is very traditional.
I then reverse them when brought back into the cave. I do watch for excessive condensation inside and remove it when needed. I use this humidifier to control my moisture. This actually performs a dual purpose since it contains a fan that does a great job at moving the air gently through the 'Cave.
0コメント