Trevor, thank you so much for all the details you put in this. Microbial families on the udders from where they sleep!. This is something I simply would never have never considered but it’s a “durgh, of course!”, like the microbes on a sourdough bread bakers hands.
Quick question, the chest freezer - was this temperature/humidity regulated in any way or simply closed up at whatever ambient temperature there is there? If so, was it pretty cool mornings there, being not far from the coast?
Cheers and thanks again for the great work you’re doing!, Leon
I haven’t had much success with wash rind cheese, but this makes me determined to give it another go. We’re not too far from the coast and sub tropical. I tend to make most of my cheeses in winter as it gets too hot in summer.
Now it makes sense, why all the Danish cheeses were smear-ripened, and even commodity cheese or “kid cheese” there has some smear flavor. Salt-tolerant smear bacteria growing in a country that is nearly all coastline. To me the developing smear smells like the sea, that’s how you know it’s taken hold well. I learned to make all of these, not long ago, but the small plants in every town, which made those cheeses up til the late 1900s are mostly closed . I was first there in 1970, the heyday of Danish local artisan cheesemaking. Arla the conglomerate took over more and more of them after the 1970s.
Trevor, thank you so much for all the details you put in this. Microbial families on the udders from where they sleep!. This is something I simply would never have never considered but it’s a “durgh, of course!”, like the microbes on a sourdough bread bakers hands.
Quick question, the chest freezer - was this temperature/humidity regulated in any way or simply closed up at whatever ambient temperature there is there? If so, was it pretty cool mornings there, being not far from the coast?
Cheers and thanks again for the great work you’re doing!, Leon
This was an excellent post, thank you. I love reading about your cheese pilgrimages, although it sometimes leaves me 1, envious, 2, hungry.
I haven’t had much success with wash rind cheese, but this makes me determined to give it another go. We’re not too far from the coast and sub tropical. I tend to make most of my cheeses in winter as it gets too hot in summer.
Now it makes sense, why all the Danish cheeses were smear-ripened, and even commodity cheese or “kid cheese” there has some smear flavor. Salt-tolerant smear bacteria growing in a country that is nearly all coastline. To me the developing smear smells like the sea, that’s how you know it’s taken hold well. I learned to make all of these, not long ago, but the small plants in every town, which made those cheeses up til the late 1900s are mostly closed . I was first there in 1970, the heyday of Danish local artisan cheesemaking. Arla the conglomerate took over more and more of them after the 1970s.