Waxing methods

[adalton]

I have been brushing my wax on and it's been a pain in the butt.  I have an aluminum stockpot that probably holds about 6 quarts of liquid I was thinking about buying enough wax to fill it about 3/4 of the way full and just dipping my cheese in it to wax.  Then letting it cool, putting the lid on it and storing it until my next use.  Does anyone see a problem doing this? 

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

I brush wax on myself, but my cheeses are in the smallish size (about 1 kg; 10 litre batches).  Dipping is quite a common method, and the results are supposed to be much nicer looking.  The one thing to be careful about is that the wax is slippery so, after dipping one side, when you turn the cheese around to dip the other, be careful not to drop it into the wax and make a huge mess!  Other than that, it should work fine.  Might take a while to melt all that wax, so I would recommend melting it in a double boiler set up.

- Jeff

[zenith1]

Dipping gives a very nice smooth finish. We have a member Wayne Harris who made a very nice rack to dip his wheels. Search the forum for that thread, it has some nice pictures of the device he made. Also be very careful with that much hot wax.(I'm sure that you don't need another mother) but that stuff can be nasty.

[Boofer]

I tried painting hot wax on a cheese the very first time, but it cooled too quickly for my tastes so I gravitated to dipping.

It does take quite some time to heat wax and that volume you're considering might be overkill. When I was waxing my 3-4lb wheels all I needed was enough to coat half the wheel at a time. That's probably at most a pint which I would heat in an aluminum pie pan placed in a skillet with water. I heated it that way and it worked okay for me. There are no doubt other methods to get the job done. I had a separate pie pan for red wax and another for clear/yellow.

The first thing I would do was grasp the wheel by the flat surfaces and roll the wheel in the hot wax, coating just the edge all around. Then I would hold it momentarily to let it cool and harden a bit so that I could grasp the newly-waxed sides (think of a tire tread). I would then lightly grip the wheel by the "tread" and coat the first flat side. Then I would dip the other side and complete the job. At that point I would lay the wheel down on a sheet of wax paper. Now it's time to check for pinholes, so I'd use a clean toothpick and daub hot wax into and smooth over any suspicious imperfections in the wax seal. I would have a prepared small piece of paper with the cheese name, number, and date waxed. This label would be dipped in the hot wax and adhered to one of the flat sides of the wheel.

That worked fairly well for the first half dozen or so cheeses I made, then I moved from the Dark Side and bought a FoodSaver vacuum-sealer...and haven't looked back since. The preservation seal is so much cleaner, quicker, and more efficient. If I need to examine or sample a cheese, it's easy to open the bag, do what I need to do, and either reseal the same bag or move the cheese to a new bag. Also very easy to label and store.

So I've got a bunch of cheese wax that I've stored away. Perhaps for an aesthetic appearance I would break it out and seal with wax, but otherwise no.

-Boofer-