Testing the Aged Cheese

Back in this blog post from December: Making Basic Cheese, we made some basic cheese, sealed it and have been aging it in our wine cooler for quite a while.  You can go back and read that post along with four others in the series to see how we did it if you missed it.  This week we decided that it was high time to pull it out and give it a try.  Here is a two pound wheel of cheese that we made almost eight months ago.

Pulling an aged wheel out of the cooler

When Tricia sealed this wheel of cheese with wax, she sealed a piece of paper in it with the date on it, so that we could track the amount of time that we aged the cheese.

Dated 11/14/2013

The cheese has been waxed to keep it from drying out.  Have you ever purchased a package of Kraft cheese at the grocery store and left it opened but unsealed in the refrigerator?  If you've done that, you know that the outer edges of the opened cheese will dry out and get hard and inedible.  That's why during the aging process, we wax it to keep that from happening.

Peeling off the wax

We'll save the wax and melt it to reuse the next time we make cheese.  Peeling the wax off is very simple and it comes off easily.

Now because of this next picture I almost titled this post "Tricia cut the cheese," but almost 24 years of marriage has taught me that that would not have been a wise decision and I would pay dearly for that momentary lapse in judgment.  So I resisted that temptation.  Tricia did, however, carve a slice of cheese out of the aged wheel to taste.  It was good.  Not great, but very good.  We're going to keep trying this and learning about it and getting better at it.  That's what it's all about.

Taking a slice out to try

One thing that we've learned is that while this cheese might not be the best cheese in the world for snacking on, it is fantastic for cooking with.  It is great in omelets, pasta, tacos. casseroles and other such dishes and we use it quite frequently for those type situations.  In fact, we haven't purchased cheese in quite a while.  I consider that a big plus.

Slice of homemade basic cheese from Our Maker's Acres

So we unwrapped the entire wheel and we have already put a big dent in it.  I'll show you one of the ways we used it in another post either tomorrow or the next day.

Basic cheese

While we certainly can't claim to be experts in the craft of artisan cheese makers, we're learning new things and finding new, exciting uses for the products that we make right here on our little homestead farm.