I know it contaminates far and wide but at what stage?
I mean how worried do I need to be about my vat, drain bag, colander and such? Does it only contaminate once it blooms?
According to Caldwell it will definitely get into everything. She suggested that if you do blues commercially you should keep them completely isolated (to the point of even making them in a different place!). Having said that, if you are doing it for home cheesemaking I would not worry over much about your equipment except to say that you should be disinfecting it anyway (boil everything you can and use something like Starsan on everything else). It's more to do with the room itself. It's hard to disinfect every surface.
I have a really aggressive blue in my apartment, though luckily it is quite delicious as well. Blue mould shows up on everything here eventually given the right humidity. I seem to be stuck between red, blue or white on my cheese at some point depending on how I treat the cheese. Blue requires oxygen, though, so even if you infect the milk, it will only present itself on the surface where there is air. From there it can grown inward and I've found that I can get quite a pronounced blue flavour eventually even if I have minimal blooming. But it always starts on the surface. If you control it there, you will eventually win. I'm a bit of a super taster for some flavours and if I *ever* get blue on my cheese I can taste it on the rind. However, if I am careful with it, I never get it in the paste. YMMV.
So my sanitizing procedure on my equipment should stop it.
If it has it's own cave I might be able to control it?
Ha ha! I'm not going to touch that with a 10 foot pole :-) I don't have anywhere near the experience to say one way or the other. There are a lot of commercial producers who just say "no" to blue. Caldwell said in her book that when she was doing research for her book she made some blue cheeses, infected her commercial cheeses and had to throw a lot out. I seem to remember that you are doing this commercially, so I think you need to do some risk assessment. Will the increase in sales from selling blues make up for the risk of introducing blue mould to your system?
For me, I wouldn't say that the blue invasion was markedly worse after the first time I made a blue cheese. Of course, that is at least partly because it has always been a problem from day one!
Yes, blue is incredibly aggressive. If I make a relatively dry cheese with a good rind (like a parmesan), it is not much trouble after the first week or so, because it is too dry. But for most cheeses, even with a good rind, it is hard to keep the blue away unless I vac-bag the cheese ... OR unless I persuade something else to out-compete it. I don't have any trouble with blue infecting my camemberts, for example, and when I've gotten a good b. Linens going, it has kept the blues away.
If I really want a clean rind on an Asiago or Lancashire or such, I have to stay on top of it every day to keep it from getting established ... but inevitably I wind up being consumed by work for a few days, and the blue gets a firm foothold, and then I can never completely get rid of it - there will always be a dark spot at the least where it was. But I can bag it after cleaning it off, and it doesn't go any further.
But realistically and specifically speaking. If I make a blue with no other cheeses exposed, put it in a separate aging cave, only take it out to flip or wipe down or pierce. If I sanitize everything prior to reusing and never take it out of it's cave when there are other cheeses exposed. How long will I have to worry about contaminating a fresh cheese down the road? Will my stainless steel vat for ever be contaminated? What about the cheesecloth draining bag of plastic mold? Are they to be used for blues only from now on? Will the blue only contaminate the surface of any other hard cheese I make from now on?
Steff, I wish I knew the answer. I suspect that you will never be able to assume that your other cheeses are and will stay blue-free, but certainly what you describe should have as good a chance as possible to avoid active contamination.
thanks I will let you know how I make out.
I also don't know the answer. I mean it's all in the details. I did homebrewing for several decades and had a huge yeast bank. I maintained yeasts that I cultured from bottles of beer, and even a few that I managed to get from real ale that I smuggled out of pubs. In my 20-30 years of brewing I only ever got a cross contamination that resulted in weird flavours once. One the other hand, I had friends who, despite their best efforts, were never able to make a non-spoiled batch of beer, even with clean laboratory yeast. It's all in the details (and a bit to do with luck too).
Definitely there are producers who make both blues and non-blues and have worked out a system that works well for them. Whether you will be able to replicate that success is dependent upon so many variables that it is impossible for anyone to say. In the Savoie region, there are dairies that make both reblochon and tomme. In some of those, the guy that flips the tomme is *never* allowed in the reblochon cave so that the mucor from the tomme won't get into the reblochon cave.
My local blue is so aggressive that it doesn't matter to me anyway. I'm going to get blue in everything and I just need to deal with it. Potentially that will happen to you as well. If you are prepared to deal with that risk, then I think it's fine. If the worst comes to worst you can specialise in blues ;-) Good luck! I'll be very interested to hear how it turns out!
I visited an affineur in London by the name of Neal's Yard Dairy, and I can tell you they age different types of cheese in their aging arches. They have different 'rooms' for different type but when they maintain the cheese, they maintain in the same enclosure. They also have cloth bound Hafod cheddar, Kirkham Lancashire and Gorwydd Caerphilly in the same facility but different 'room'. And those guys are covered in blue!
I also visited Joe Schneider's Stichelton farm and their Stilton type blue is only blue on the inside, not on the outside. To be able to do that, they let the geo flourish by putting the cheese into hastener of 21C for few days.
So what I observe (and what I gathered from my course haha), if you do not want blue, add yeast. Yeasts and blue has the same food but yeasts eats faster. Once yeasts flourish, you are less likely to have blue.
For hard cheese, make sure you have good rind, just remember Tomme de Savoie and Gorwydd Caerphilly are covered with blue but they usually have pristine paste.
Here are some pictures from the Stichelton's farm visit.
First picture is the hastener.
Second picture is the new scraped cheese, all white.
The rest are the cheeses at different ages. By the way, their aging cave had strong smell of ammonia, at some spots it was very very strong I had urges to cough. But no ammonia tasted on the cheese I tried though, I supposed it was just the byproduct of proteolytic breakdown.
Good luck in your cheese making, I hope you make your blue cheese after all. ;D
Wow! That's really interesting! I have a question about forming a good rind, though. What's the best way to do that? I'm finding that I'm really not getting a really impervious rind until about the 1 month mark, which is about the time when the blue gives up anyway ;-) Is it a matter of drying it off after pressing, or is there more to it than that?
Mike, I've only made a few blues - a couple of Gorgonzolas (which turned out quite well), a couple of Stilton attempts (neither of which I was overly impressed with), and a Danablu (half of which I smoked; turned out very well). With none of these would I say that there has been anything resembling an impervious rind. Of course, that may just mean I've done it wrong ... :)
Quote from: mikekchar on May 26, 2019, 09:02:06 AM
Wow! That's really interesting! I have a question about forming a good rind, though. What's the best way to do that? I'm finding that I'm really not getting a really impervious rind until about the 1 month mark, which is about the time when the blue gives up anyway ;-) Is it a matter of drying it off after pressing, or is there more to it than that?
Hi Mike, I don't think blue cheese should have impervious rind (if I understand it correctly). the rind is pierced to let the air in, so it should not be too hard or impenetrable. The techniques that I use to build up the rind of my blues; get the geo going before piercing and I let it alone afterwards, no patting down, no brushing etc. I flip more often in the beginning and less later on.This suits me better since I process 500-800L of milk each time, lots of wheels of cheese to take care of.
I also never press my blues, I just make bigger wheels and let gravity do its thing. If I find the rind too soft even after salting, I put a little more and keep them in slightly drier ambiance.