Blue Cheese

I recently cut open my first wheel of blue cheese and friends had come down from San Francisco, expecting a triumph.  Luckily, they got one, but those were some nervous moments in the kitchen when I first pressed the knife through the admittedly funky rind.



Is it rotten?
It certainly smells like blue cheese, but that's just the outside.

Will it be blue?
It's been ten weeks.  Surely that's long enough.

Is it too dry?
It shouldn't be; I followed all the directions.


These are just a few of the fears that dissipated once I'd split it open, given it a good sniff, and sampled a crumb that fell to the plate.  The cheese was great, but it was great for a first.  I learned a lot and now know that I've got a long way to go to perfect the making of blue mold-ripened cheeses.  Here's a few of the takeaways:

1.  Humidity Is Key
  
I tried to maintain a relatively high humidity inside the box in which I aged the cheese.  Some resources suggested 60-70% humidity while others went as high as 95%.  While those suggesting lower levels warned against the cheese "sweating" out moisture, others seemed to embrace it, noting that "slime" should be scraped off at regular intervals.  The final product was on the firmer side, but not terribly dry, though perhaps a little flaky.  That is, it crumbles easily and isn't the sort of spreadable blue cheese some of you might imagine when you think of this variety.  Indeed, there are quite soft blues out there (and I think my next one will be), but that likely has more to do with how much I "cooked" the curds than the humidity level during aging.

2.  There's Forgiveness in Aging Temperature

Ideally, the cheese would've been aged at a steady 55F for the the whole ten weeks, and I did my best to maintain that temperature.  As I used a shed beside my house as the "cheese cave," however, there was some fluctuation.  Monterey, CA, the city in which I live, has a remarkably steady climate, but nights routinely got down into the forties and days occasionally reached seventy.  The cool, dark shed, however, likely only got up to 65F and the temperature was generally too cool as opposed to too warm.  That said, I was very worried that any deviation from the strictly prescribed 55F would ruin my cheese, but it didn't seem to make a difference.  Perhaps I'll learn in time that these little fluctuations do make subtle differences in texture and flavor, but I don't think they're going to ruin your cheese.

3.  Careful How You Aerate!

Holes must be poked in blue cheeses a few days after setting (generally after they've developed blue mold on the outside) to allow airflow within the cheese and facilitate bacterial growth.  No air = no mold = no blue cheese.  With that in mind, I think smaller holes are preferable to larger ones.  I used a sterilized screwdriver, creating perhaps 25 roughly 1/6" holes.  These were far too big.  I feel certain that I could've achieved adequate aeration with skewers or knitting needles as the reading suggested, but I wanted to be sure of a success.  Well, I got one, but I also got about two-dozen holes in my cheese that developed what amounts to rind running through the cheese.  That is, just as the outside is mottled, tough, dry, and covered in an edible but overly pungent rind, so too were the insides of these holes.  This wasn't any great harm, of course, but they're unsightly and inconvenient, forcing one to eat around them or sample a little rind with each bite.