Scaling Cheese Making Recipes - Air Drying Duration

[ukdavid]

Need a bit of advice.
I have just made approximately 2 Lb of Gouda from the recipe in Ricki Carroll's book (P 114). it tells me to Air dry it for 3 weeks. I have in fact made two one pound wheels. As they are smaller do I need to half the drying time?

Thanks in advance

David

[bbracken677]

For my experience (low humidity here in north central texas) a couple of days at room temp is sufficient or even more than sufficient. For 1 lb cheeses I would suggest 24 hours drying and then into "mini-caves" with the top ajar into your aging environment.  The times I have left a small cheese out longer than that the whole cheese lost enough moisture to be evident later on. I have since adopted the above method for most of my cheeses...I let the outside get dryish to the touch and then move them into a storage container inside my cave.

[ukdavid]

Thanks for that bb, makes sense to me.

David