Calibrating my Stilton

[KTownCheese]

Hi all, Its been a while since i have made any cheese and posted here, but like many of you, I seem to have an abundance of free time these days.

That being said I got back into cheese making a bit and started with a tilsit and a stilton.  Bold choice for a novice but these are some of my favourite cheeses and it seems you can't buy tilsit in my area any more.

Things started out great with some blue mold, then it exploded within a matter of 5 days.

Currently its sitting at 3.5 weeks and the blue is sort of giving way to a orange luster. In between there were some obvious P. Cand. blooms.
I originally was going to ask about the mold progression and if this was normal but after a deep dive in this forums rabbit hole of info it seems this is common.
Super pumped to cut into this guy in a couple weeks.

Cheers
Al

[KTownCheese]

So we are about 5 weeks into the aging and I couldn't resist cracking the smaller stilton.
Its taken on a wicked orange hue and has become a bit soft.

The cheese had a nice bloomy taste and was very soft like a brie.  this is likely due to the fact that I didn't press the curds for the smaller cheese. Just threw them in the mold.
The taste was also accompanied by a good level of salt and a mild funk similar to tislit.  I imagine ther was some cross contamination between the two in my cave.
Over all it was a very tasty cheese.



 

[mikekchar]

It's pretty common to do a washed rind on a stilton as far as I can tell.  However, those cheeses are huge, so the impact on the flavour of the cheese is minimal.  They basically get a good schmear going and then dry it out.  But with that small cheese, the surface area to volume is really large so the ammonia produced by the b. linens is going to basically soften the paste like a washed rind (as you found out).  It looks delicious :-)