I'm making my first Swiss-type cheese from goat milk. For the past week, per instructions, I've kept the cheese around 55 degrees and high humidity, and every day I've wiped it down with a saturated brine. Yesterday I removed it from the cool storage and for the next six days I'm supposed to keep it at room temperature so the holes can develop. This morning the rind has beads of oil forming on the surface. Is this normal? Or is it indicative of an error in my cheesemaking?
Hi rosawoodsii, sweating oil from cheese rind is normally either too high a temperature or cheese with high butterfat %, see Wiki: Surface Defects, Oily (https://cheeseforum.org/articles/wiki-cheese-surface-defects-oily/).
But for Swiss type cheeses sweating is a common step, search the Forum on "sweating" to find a few threads mostly about Swiss type cheeses.
Ah! Thank you! That makes sense, since it hadn't happened at a lower temperature, and room temperature is required for the hole formation.