Author Topic: Ripening cheese in spring water  (Read 1635 times)

Corriemony Farm

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Ripening cheese in spring water
« on: July 15, 2012, 08:51:04 PM »
Our cow freshened a week ago and I need to start making cheese.  Twenty years ago I had a goat dairy and was hooked to the grid so supporting a fridge just for ripening cheese wasn't a problem. However, now I live off grid and don't have enough panels or batteries to support a cheese fridge (until a couple of weeks ago the only fridge we had was a propane one no bigger than a large cooler. It works great as a milk fridge as it cools down below freezing if I want it to) and the house (camp, really) is built on a slab, so no basement.  However, we do have a spring that comes out of the side of our hill and runs year-round and when I checked the temp today (on a day in the mid-90s) the water was between 48-50 degrees. Any ideas on how I can use this spring to keep the cheese at the right temp? Submerged or build a spring house?  Any thoughts on this will be very much appreciated. Thanks!   Ellen & Mike 

Tomer1

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Re: Ripening cheese in spring water
« Reply #1 on: July 15, 2012, 09:58:50 PM »
You can likely build a mesh for the water to run thru and put jars of feta cheese in there.
Also vacuum bagged hard cheeses will work.

Offline dukegus

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Re: Ripening cheese in spring water
« Reply #2 on: July 16, 2012, 08:52:20 PM »
Welcome Ellen and Mike!

There is an acid coagulated Greek cheese that is made in buckets inside small streams,
because in Greece summer is very hot, and for some strange reason noone here though of making a cave...,
people after gathering about 40lt milk(mostly sheep's though) they put it in buckets and left it halfway
in small streams at around 5C for about a month. The bucket usually had a small hole in the bottom closed
with a cork and after the curds had coagulated, they uncorked it and the whey run of.

That's my little story!