Hello, I'm brand new here. Just got a Mad Millie's hard cheese kit for my birthday. Very exciting! But reading through the recipes immediately noticed "age cheese at 10 degrees C". Of course I started googling and discovered cheese caves and now I am here and paralysed with indecision!
I feel like my two options are to buy a second hand undercounter fridge, attach a thermostat (inkbird?) and use some kind of wet towel arrangement for humidity OR buy a second hand wine fridge which can be set to the right temp, then use a hygrometer, humidifier and fan to keep humidity right.
Can you tell I've been googling?!
I'm very confused and on a tight budget so I really don't want to make a foolish choice at this stage. I can't afford to be wasting cheeses and getting discouraged from the outset.
Please advise!
I think anywhere from 10 C to 13 C is a good temperature for aging. Along with that, you need the proper humidity if you are going to do natural rinds. Probably the easiest way to age cheeses is to get a vacuum packer, vacuum pack the cheese and put it in a fridge that has a temperature controller on it (either buy one already set up like that, like a wine fridge, or buy a small refrigerator and a temperature controller and put it together yourself). With vacuum packing you just need to concentrate on temperature and to flip them every once in a while to make sure that you get even salt distribution.
While you *can* try to maintain the humidity of a fridge for doing natural rinds, I don't recommend it necessarily. Instead, I recommend "maturation boxes". Basically you buy some Tupperware style food-safe boxes at the dollar store and age your cheeses in there. There are many problems with trying to keep a fridge at the right humidity for cheese. First, by design, most fridges try to maintain a humidity of 70%, so you will be fighting against that design. Also, it's hard to keep an even humidity around the entire fridge, so you probably want to some airflow (some kind of fan). Finally, because a fridge cools by cooling the walls of the fridge, condensation will appear there and essentially you have to deal with a wet fridge.
For a maturation box, you want a box that is about 3 times the size of the cheese. Cheese has a density that's pretty close to water, so you want about 1.5 liters of capacity for every 500 grams of cheese (or about 1.5 quarts per lb of cheese). This allows you to maintain the humidity in the box mostly from the moisture on the cheese. The downside is that you really need to take the cheese out of the box, flip it and wipe out the box every day. You can miss a day here or there, but missing several days pretty much means you'll get mold that you didn't want (as the moisture levels will get too high and the oxygen in the box will start to run out). I'm a massive fan of maturation boxes and unless you are making a wheel of cheese every day, I think they are the way to go.
Now, the *cheapest* way (in capitol cost, anyway) for setting up a cave is actually to use a picnic cooler. I have a 15 liter picnic cooler that will hold up to 4 small maturation boxes. I use frozen plastic soda bottles to keep it cool and use a couple of other soda bottles with brine (or just water) to use as a temperature ballast in the box. In the winter the place where I keep it is quite cool (probably about 15 degrees) and I only need to change the ice every couple of days. In the summer, I have to change the ice twice a day. Also in the summer, the cooler actually gets quite a lot of condensation on it, so I wrap it in a mylar space blanket. This catches the condensation (and keeps my floor dry) and also adds a bit more insulation. I measure the temperature of the box by measuring the temperature of the ballast water. It's all a complete PITA, but especially if you already have a cooler, it's the method I recommend until you get something else sorted out.
I think the last thing I'll say is that natural rinds are very, very fun, but they take a lot of experience to do well. At first the tendency is to think, "Oh, I'll just wipe off any mold on the rind and it will be fine". This does not work *at all*. Cheese rinds grow mold on them -- it's what they do. You need to learn how to encourage the things you want growing on the rind and discourage the things that you don't want growing on the rind. IMHO, the art of affinage (aging cheese) is at least as deep as the art of making it in the first place. Some people very reasonably choose not to get into it because it is a lot to take in and there is very little information available on how to do it well (apart from making bloomy rind cheeses, which are pretty straight forward). So if you decide to do natural rinds, I suggest starting with fresh cheeses and work on aging your cheeses out 1 week at first. Then age for 1 month. Then age for 2 months. This will give you challenges in stages that are reasonable. If you decide to do a natural rind that takes 6 months to age on your first go, it is probably destined for the trash can.
I've got a device similar to the one you mention and as I'm on a pension I don't have cash to throw about.
I got an inkbird type controller from china off ebay for less than £10 pounds and a second hand fridge.
I originally bought it for temperature controlled brewing.
It doubles as a cheese cave. I bung my cheese in the fridge for a week or so while the beer ferments and up the temperature to 21C .
When it is done I drop the temp to 10C and hey presto its a cheese cave again.
I also bought a shrink wrap machine, also multi-purpose, but handy for sealing cheese for storage and taking care of the humidity issue.
Different folks have different ways of doing and variety accounts for all the types of bread, beer and cheese you can experience, so bring it on and discover/invent your own personal product!
Good luck, have fun and learn.
two very useful answers, thank you!
I believe my kit makes cheeses that are adapted for beginners, so the 'Cheddar' only needs to be matured for 5 or 6 weeks. The kit also includes wax which i assume is to avoid the need for a natural rind?
So, If I understand correctly, I need to get a cheapo second hand fridge and set it up with a thermostat and THEN get maturation tupperwares in which to keep the cheeses moist. They will then need to be taken out daily, turned and the BOX wiped down (not the cheese? just the box?) to keep the humidity under control.
If I have that right that seems very simple... I am encouraged!
Well, the cheese needs things done to it too :-) Wax is just as good as vacuum packing. For a natural rind, ideally you need to encourage a yeast called "geotrichum candidum" to grow on your cheese. You will almost certainly get that yeast (it starts out slimy and ends up white an powdery) as well as blue mold. If it's too humid, you may get mildew (black spots that mark the rind). When you get blue mold, you should wash it off with a 3% brine solution. So it's a bit more complicated. Unfortunately I don't have time to type more.
I've not been cheesemaking long so you'd be doing well to study the answers of others on this forum.
My first lesson was time, well not so much time as haste. I was disappointed with my first cheeses before I discovered that if the instructions say ripen for a month then actually ripen for at least two months and so on. Honestly it is well worth waiting, the flavour and texture of your product will improve greatly if you are patient. Sometimes if I am feeling impatient I will cut a cheese in half then store half and consume half, but time does improve the results.
The temperature controller is an STC-1000-Controller you can find them on ebay at anything from about £6 up to around £20. If you check out ebay you will find plenty of instructions for setting them up. Whether it is for brewing or cheese making it is the same setup.
There are lots of pieces of equipment you can spend money on, but none is absolutely essential. Cheesemaking began as a rustic art performed with little more than a bucket and a supply of milk.
Some way of compressing curds using a length of wood, a hole in a wall and a collection of large stones comes next. The exact methods of the process define the type of the cheese which will emerge.
Digital cheese is a very recent product. The ancients produced delicious home made cheese with no need for such sophistication.
I agree that fancy equipment is not necessary. However, I have a caveat. Things like thermometers and pH meters are incredibly useful. You actually don't need either, but if you don't have it, then you need experience and knowledge as a replacement. It's easy to say that 36 C is about blood temperature and anything less feels cool while anything more feels warm. Bath water is feel just a bit hot at 42 C. Using these guides and practice, you can make any kind of cheese (except parmesan, where you will burn yourself at the 55 C cook point ;-)) However, you need to make cheese every single day to develop that feel. With a thermometer you put the device in a look at the number.
Similarly, back in the golden oldy days people would wander down to their local magma shafts to age their cheeses. That's where the famous producers made cheese. You can build a nice cave if you dig a big enough hole and have 10's of thousands of dollars for masonry. Or you can buy a fridge.
I get a bit ruffled because I hang out on reddit too much and there is a subset of people who believe ignorance is best and tools should be abandoned. People 200 years ago didn't know how pH worked in cheese, but still made good cheese. Therefore you *shouldn't* know about it. It's frustrating at times. They forget that the replacement for knowledge and tools is a couple of hundred years of trial and error experience handed down from craftsman to craftsman. You can't just show up out of the blue and say, "I'm going to make cheese the old-fashioned way" and expect to make something good.
Please stay unruffled Mike, I am no Luddite, but neither would I encourage a novice into believing that without the 'best' kit there is no point in attempting to make cheese.
Given an unlimited budget, do as you will, but otherwise enjoy the learning process, there is much to discover and it needn't cost a fortune.
If you're just starting out, you may want to just age your (vacuum sealed or waxed) wheels in a regular fridge.
I've done so many times and while the cheese takes longer to achieve the ideal flavor/texture, it's quite good. A Colby, Monterey Jack or similar is a great starter cheese - straightforward and delicious at 2-3 months.
I bought a fridge!!! Eeeeeeeee! So flaming exciting! Just need to buy and wire in my thermostat and I can start making cheese. So cool. Will browse the forum for a bit to pick up tips but thank you so much for the advice so far xxx