One of my favorite episodes of the tv sitcom
Frasier tells of Nile's mis-adventures when trying to decide if he and his wife would make good parents. To simulate an infant, he carries around and 'cares for' a 10 pound bag of flour ...and the humor begins when all sorts of bad things accidently happen to it. That story reminds me of my first Stilton...
It is 3 gallon grocery milk plus cream made May 8. Spores were harvested from a store-bought stilton. All seemed to go well through through the make, draining, milling, hooping and turnings. There even were hints of blue when I removed the hoop (a converted plastic tupperware cannister). I was very hopeful - what possibly could go wrong?
After a Manchego, this was the second cheese I tried to make. At least the second cheese I'm willing to admit to. (I dont acknowledge that 1st mozz made with lime juice, which was eventually eventually cut into tiny pieces, wrapped tightly with twine, dipped in white dimpled plastic, labeled 'Nike', and used on the driving range...
)
At the time of the 1st Stilton make, I really didnt know what I was doing (not that anything much has changed), and didnt realized I needed to keep the new cheese in a place with high humidity. So the blue stopped growing and some pinkish thing started. I dont know if it was a fungus, slime mold, bacterium, yeast or alien life form, but whatever it was, it wasnt blue.
So I scraped it off and smeared some more blue spores on it. That didnt help, the pinkish sticky stuff was too entrenched and re-grew. Sigh.
After reading some more, I transferred this cheese into a smaller container, this time with moisture, and into the regular cheese cave . Still in a state of willful denial, I decided to proceed and pierce the thing. I had a nice metal awl and sterilized that. In the process, I cracked the cheese. The awl apparently was too thick.
Undeterred, I sanitized some twine and tied the cheese back together. It looked as if it needed some time in rehab. I should have taken a mug shot.
Another couple more weeks I decided I wanted to know what was going on inside, and it was no longer speaking to me. Since I had accepted this Stilton had become a practice cheese, and without a real cheese trier, I first used a round vegetable thingie and took a plug. I saw no blue.
Sniff. I then took a sharp knife and took another plug and saw a bit of blue inside. Well, that was not enough of a view for me, so today on it's 2 month anniversery, I decided to slice the poor thing in half, and surprise, there is a nice blue netting inside. It has a bit of an off taste but I'm hoping it's just because it's not old enough yet. So I'm putting it back and letting it age longer. Not sure what the best way to do that is however. Any suggestions, lol?
More recently I've made 2 other Stiltons. I've hopefully learned a few things from that first run, and hopefully these newer ones will turn out better. They already have nice external bluing that the first one never developed. They are in the second photo, Stilton 2 and 3. The one on the right is 2 weeks old. It's 4+ gallons, and the one on the left is almost 1 week old and is 6+ gallons. Both are in a cooled ice chest kept between 55 and 60*F.
If neither of the new ones turn out well, I'll probably shift to making smaller blues. Temporarily. Hope springs eternal.
