How to Store Cheese

Warren: The question we get all the time here is, “how should I be storing my cheese?” So first of all we need to define what “Storing” means; if the cheese is in a wheel and it hasn’t been cut, is entirely a different story, right? Hugh: Absolutely Warren: In some cases it must be refrigerated, well wrapped, in some cases it can sit at a room temperature like hard Gouda’s, which are developing and aging, but let’s assume now that Storing means, we cut you some cheese here and send you home with it. We’ve got a variety of cheeses, we’ve got some soft cheeses, we’ve got some hard cheeses; we wrap them in plastic or paper and give it to them, they take them home, they put them on tray, they serve them, it’d be sitting for an hour and a half, now they got to wrap them again, where should we start? Hugh: The trick of the cheeses is that the one thing that hurts cheese more than anything else is dryness; when cheese loses its moisture, it loses all its flavor, it gets an unpleasant texture. Your main goal when you’re storing cheeses in your fridge, don’t worry about molds, don’t worry about anything like it going bad, cheese last for ages, the big thing to worry about is your cheese drying out; which is why you don’t usually want to use the cheese drawn on your fridge. Cheese drawn on your fridge is very cold and dry because they, it’ll make the cheese go longer without going bad, but it’ll dry out really fast. We wrap cheese in plastic; plastic pretty much holds all of the moisture in for quite a long time, but if you’ve got your cheese and you take it out of the plastic, you never want to put it back in the plastic we gave you, they won’t be sticky anymore, it won’t stick to the cheese. Warren: Never reuse the same plastic Hugh: Never reuse the same plastic, get a new piece; if you’re going to waste it from the plastic, throw it out, but your cheese is going to last twice as long. As soon as you open it up, it’s not going to stick together, moisture will get out, air will get in, it’ll be too bad for it. What you really want to do is wrap, if you’ve got butcher paper or cheese-wrapping paper, wrap it in that; wax paper works and if you want it to last really long time, then wrap that paper-wrapped cheese in plastic. Leave it in the vegetable drawer in the fridge, where it’s much moister. You’ll get a much better tasting cheese for much longer that way. Warren: Now in terms of cheese styles and how long their ages are, on one end we have the fresh edams which are going to last maybe a week or two after we’ve solved them, and then we’d got the hard pressed cheddars and the Goudas that are going to last for weeks, months. What’s the bad sign and what’s the good sign? Hugh: Usually it’s a bad sign when your soft cheeses go from being soft to being squishy, likewise with your hard cheese Warren: Is it the smell and the taste? Sour. Hugh: Yeah, the texture, when the texture softens, when the flavor or the textures doesn’t seem right, usually it’s pretty easy to tell. You don’t need to worry about spots or mold on your cheese, that’s something that’ll happen inevitably. If they’ve been in the cheese case, they’ve been exposed to spores of molds; they’re cut on the same cutters Warren: Exposed your hands Hugh: Yeah your, at the hands of the shop, of the cutter, all of these things have the spores from blue cheeses, from blue miring cheeses; so it’s natural that they get transferred on the pretty much every cheese that you get. So there will always be blue or white in the environment that can grow on your cheese, and that’s one of the problems; you can just take that off if you don’t like it. Warren: Right, just scrape it back any mold that’s blue or white and continually eat the cheese. Hugh: And something a lot of people do is to look at their cheese that’s been in their fridge for couple of weeks and say, “this has gone bad”, and they’ll throw it out”. Usually what you have to do is just cut off couple of millimeters of the front edge, and the rest of the cheese will be perfect, cause most of the time that’s not going to penetrate into the cheese; even when it dries out, you can just take off one face and the rest will be great. Warren: They say that the biggest problem is moisture and I agree with you there, of course, we’re trying to preserve the cheeses for what they are; but let’s say for example, well this had happened to me last week, a gentleman came in and said, “I like your brie sir, but I like it drier, then what I’m experiencing today; and maybe tell me if you would give him the same advice which is, “ go home and poorly wrap this cheese and wrap it so that it does have a little bit of ventilation, let it dry, you are going to lose a little bit of flavor on the surface, can it develop kind of waxiness but you have that flinty quality, the texture you want. Hugh: You could do that, you’re definitely going the face of the cheese is going to have any taste at all. The trick is that once you’ve cut into the wheel of cheese, it’s not really going to ripen anymore; it’s not going to develop further Warren: But it will dry out Hugh: It’ll dry out a bit but it won’t have more flavors to it. If he just wants the texture to be harder, you could do that, I’m not sure how well it’ll work, how well it will target what are you going for; it’ll definitely get firmer and drier and flintier. Warren: I’ll tell you what, I had an aged Gouda and an aged Chevon Gruyere in my fridge that was poorly wrapped and unattended for at least a month and I found actually that the flavor intensified in the goat’s milk cheese, the flavor was less in the Gouda but they both have really nice flinty quality. Hugh: There you go, I probably would have hand (--) unpleasant but that’s just a matter of taste Warren: Yes, and my taste is better than yours Hugh: Ah, your taste is definitely wrong Warren: