Cheese Caves and Mold

[gstone]

Hey folks! I can't believe I've been away for going on five years.  Just as I started to really get going with cheese, other demands arose to steal my time and attention.

I'm contemplating cheese caves, and at the moment I'm going back and forth between retrofitting an old fridge, or going whole hog with an AC/Coolbot type system in what used to be the old coal room in the basement. 

My question concerns the potential for cross contamination between different types of molds: candidum, roqueforti, B. linens, etc.  It seems that with a room (or fridge) full of cheeses, all sporting different flora at different stages of growth, the potential for contamination would be great. Or does the direct inoculation into a particular cheese give the desired mold a leg up in competing with would-be interlopers?

Also, does anyone have any experience with sharing a cheese cave with curing charcuterie?  It would be great if I could hang my salami, prosciutto, and bacon in there as well.

[Duntov]

From experience, if you have one cave you will get cross contamination.  I have a converted fridge for my non-blue types and a mini fridge just for my blues.  However I am still getting blue in my main cave and a blue has never been in it and it is not near the mini blue cave.  I think here in the semi-tropics, blue is just part of the micro flora in the air.  I don't even worry about it anymore.  If I did, I would drive myself crazy.  So far, the blue has just been on the surface and I just clean it off once a week.  Only my Parm has developed blue 'stains'.

[Boofer]

Welcome back!

A lot of folks, including me, use minicaves (ripening boxes) to maintain humidity and limit exposure to neighbors.

-Boofer-