Hi! I'm Eric from beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Merry Christmas and Praise Cheeses!!
I've been making cheese at home for about 8 years, mostly fresh cheeses and a few experiments with mold ripened. About 3 weeks ago I started a scaled down (2gal.) batch of Fourme d'Ambert blue, following Ricki Carroll's recipe from cheesemaking.com and as far as I can tell I've done everything correctly and the cheese is pogressing nicely now at almost 3 weeks.
In the pictures on the cheesemsaking.com site, the maturing cheese seems to be mostly white on the outside with some streaks of blue. Mine was like that the first week, but since week 2 has been covered with a uniform layer of blue mold. (I tried to attach a couple of photos to this post but couldn't get them to load.)
Am I supposed to be scraping off this outer layer of blue mold? Or is it ok to let the cheese keep ripening like this?
Thanks for any suggestions, I look forward to sharing my experiences in this forum.
PraiseCheeses! Eric
Interested to hear others answers. I've done both and I've patted it down. Usually I just let a rind develop as the exterior mold growth slows and crust over.
I Just let it grow, the only blue cheese I have made is in the Stilton style and I never have messed with them to much.
You could check them out in the threads on the forum but oh wait you can't see any of the pictures ???
Hi Eric - greetings from a western suburb of Vancouver! I love the moldy rind: the color, the texture and the smell. However, I've never been able to get a uniform layer of blue - it's always mottled. So congrats to you for getting a uniform blue rind! Are you smearing it as it dries?
Here's a link to my first blue cheese and the story of how it got to BC.
https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,13847.msg110614.html#msg110614 (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,13847.msg110614.html#msg110614)