Caerphilly with a Tomme identity crisis

[mikekchar]

Just opened this today.  It's actually a Caerphilly that I aged out for 4 full months (well, 17 weeks.



I had a bit of a ride on this one.  As you can see, mechanical holes abound, but not so bad for a tomme :-)  Got full geo coverage early, but it started to get some blue.  I decided to up the humidity and it went crazy blue :-) Note: This is a bad idea...  So I reduced the humidity, but too late.  B. linens started turning the rind red under the geo and blue.  I decided just to let it go.

Eventually virtually the whole thing went blue.  However, as it dried, I started to get this brown mold.  It starts off life a cream color and spreads in circles.  Just one or two places at first, but they slowly grew.  After about 4 weeks, it covered the entire surface except for a small patch where you could still see the orange rind.  I left it another month or so and the mold just grew thicker.  Eventually it started to touch the sides of my box and unfortunately got scraped away a bit.

I knew the paste was a *bit* soft, but I was expecting it to be mostly hard and dried out.  Absolutely not the case.  The rind is spicy -- a bit like black pepper.  You get a hint of the washed rind flavour.  In the background is the cheddar and buttery flavours that you would expect from a tomme.  It's not only the best cheese I've made so far, it's the best tomme I've ever eaten.  Terrible Caerphilly, though ;-)

[pickles]

I'm no cheese expert but that looks like a cheese I'd be very pleased to sample.

I live about 200 miles drive by car from Caerphilly.
I've never seen Caerphilly that looked like that, though.
Its more like an unripe Camembert or Brie?

No offence intended, btw.

[mikekchar]

It's really nice.  It got a bit of red bacteria (b. linens) which I think softened the paste.  Definitely not a Caerphilly any more, but well worth eating!

[pickles]

Edible cheese - yesss!

[AlexCheese]

Really Great!!!
it's exactly the same consistency i try to obtain
at which pH do you stop the pressing?
do you use a storage box for aging it?

[mikekchar]

I aim for a pH of 5.3 on the Caerphilly I make.  I need to check my notes, but I think I let this one cheddar a bit longer because I was liking a little bit of extra acidity.  I don't have a pH meter any more, but if I were to guess, it probably made it down to about 5.1 or 5.2 (which would account for it being so soft).

IIRC, this cheese was 535 grams and I used a 1.3 liter ripening box on it.  I think normally you'd aim for about 1.5 liter box, but I kind of like the increased humidity I get with the smaller box.  I'm rethinking this strategy, though... (see below)It was aged in my picnic cooler cooled by ice packs (also it was winter, so my office is normally only 10-15 degrees anyway).

I'm still a bit confused about the transition from a geotrichum covered cheese to something like the above.  Although, to be fair, the blue I got on the cheese was 100% fine and did not detract from the cheese in any way.  You would never have known the cheese ever had blue on it, even though at one point it was probably 90% covered by it.  Still would like to avoid the blue.  I think keeping the humidity a bit lower is the way to go, which is why I'm thinking of switching to slightly bigger boxes.

I really loved this cheese.  I wish I could make it again, but I can't get enough milk (even though it only needs 4 liters!)  I'm hoping the supply problem is not due to covid-19.  The same thing happened last year (I remember it being very difficult to make cheese in the spring) and then once the summer got underway the stores were swimming in high quality milk.  I suspect that because these are tiny producers, they have a limited supply of milk when they are calving.