Has anyone tried aging your your hard cheese on edge?
It seems to me that I might be able to get more into my small
cave (dorm fridge) if after drying I could age them on edge and give a quarter
or half a roll as needed to keep them uniform shape and moisture?
If the cheese is firm enough to not diform under its own wight then sure
Just leave enough space for proper air circulation.
Sweet most are waxed, would this matter?
No,
Be sure its a flat surface not a mat or something like that so the pressure spreads on a large area and your less likly to dimple the cheese.
I built a little hammock kind of thing to distribute the weight and it worked ok. I had trouble with wax cracking on my havarti types without it. The problem was that with them sitting in their hammock, they were hard to turn. I guess if the cheese were hard enough it might not crack.
can you attach a pic of the hammock system you are using? Im curious.
Sonoma Dry Jack ages their cheese on the side. They have two wooden boards on angles that kind of cradle the wheel. Sounds like your on the right track. There are pictures on their site.
There's an ageing cave somewhere that ages on edge using PVC piping. To turn the cheese they just turned one of the pipes and the cheese would rotate (picture it like one of those hot dogs that sits on the counter at 7-11 twirling around for god knows how long).
That sounds like a promising idea, on a small scale. I may take a piece of PVC pipe and cut a couple of pieces out of it lengthwise to keep them from moving around as i turn them.