So it has now been nearly four months since my dad and me made our first hard cheese. We made a colby which has now done it's time so to speak and was time to have a look at. The first thing I noticed was there were a few cracks in the wax around the cheese, not big enough to notice if you weren't studying it carefully, but big enough to allow in mold I suppose as it had a few healthy colonies of different mold species growing on the surface.
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| Cheese with original wax still intact (except the side I picked open to look inside right before taking) |
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| Cheese with wax removed and mold in full glory. :P |
After googling what to do with a moldy wax rinded cheese, scraping off the mold affected area, followed by an application of cider vinegar to the surface of the cheese seemed to be the way to go. I cut off all the surface mold, then noticed that the cheese was slightly holey in the interior, which the mold had started to grow down into (picture below) so had to cut off a good side section to remove all the affected areas.
This is a side shot of the cheese when sliced through the edge. Quite a few air bubbles. More than I was expecting. Perhaps we didn't use enough pressure when in the cheese press? We did go as hard as it would go, so my other thought was that we didn't have quite enough cheese in the press for it to achieve maximum pressure on the cheese. Who knows, it's trial and error at this stage.
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| Cross section of aforementioned holy cheese. |
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| Final product after mold resection |
So now I will rewax the cheese until I find out if it still fit for human consumption, as I don't particularly want to get sick from eating off cheese. Maybe I'm just a bit wimpy, I'm sure my dad would dig in. We shall see, past experiences have given me a fine appreciation for patience, especially when it comes to mold, as I have a healthy respect for their abilities to make one feel less than spectacular. Will update once we either throw it out/eat the damn thing.
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| 1/2 rewaxed |
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| Fully rewaxed! |
