Thats my cheese but it ain’t yellow.
It may work, I have not tried it. It is only $34 for 10 doses.
Shaved my blue cheese today, Now it looks like real blue cheese. The next shave will be in 20 days. ( I’ll post a picture)
I’ve read that you can take a small piece and puree it in a blender with some milk and use that to inoculate. It would be worth 2 gallons of milk to find out. Gonna try it next.
There is a retail store a few miles from here that advertises raw cow milk and goat milk. Time to try it too. I ain’t scared ;D
Just know that the raw milk is gonna give you a totally different texture. The farmer I got my milk from was making paneer cheese and said she couldn’t do it with raw milk because it would become stringy. Depends on the cheese you’re shooting for…
someone said we were gonna start talking about sausage here. Can you stuff cheese into sausage casings? And then maybe smoke it?
I’ll bet that would work.
I got some sausages from the store that had cheese in the mix. The problem is, when you slice the sausage the cheese runs out. The bigger problem is, that’s right when you take them out of the fridge. More like “cheese” I guess. :
I think it’d be cool to have a layer of sausage, a layer of cheese, sausage, cheese, etc. until the casing is filled.
I would eat that. You’d have to cook it hot enough to cook the sausage though, so you’d have to hope the casing isn’t broken and doesn’t split during cooking. That would make for a mess in my grill.
One would have to heat it gently and slowly. Then hit it with some heat to crisp it up a bit. Or one could use harder cheeses like feta that really don’t melt very well.
I was actually thinking bleu cheese.
There is a butcher shop in my area that makes “Packer” snack sticks, they add jalapeno and cheddar and then smoke the sausage. It doesn’t melt the cheese. I’m sure it can be done.
A couple of the beer fests around here had cheese jerky booths this year. It’s like a thick mozzarella with chunks of jerky in it, not too bad.
http://www.cheesejerky.com/main.html
Since they were selling them at the second festival I think I might have accidentally stole one from the first.
Ok some “bald” blue cheese. This was a couple days from removing the first bloom. The red mold is natural. Only a few more months! Yummmmmmmm!
Ok, here’s my dumb question for the night. I’ve always been told that eating moldy things will make you sick because the mold releases toxins into the medium. Now is that one of those old wive’s tales, or is it a very special kind of mold that grows on bleu cheese?
If the latter, how does one know that his cheese is, in fact, growing the correct mold? I recognize that you innoculate it with a specific culture, but is it just hope beyond that point?
Blue cheese mold that I had afterscraping was not harmful, an I’m still here, didn’t even give my the runs. Most cheese molds won’t hurt you unless you eat alot of it.
One of the cheese molds that is the source of camabert cheese is penicillum I bet that would not hurt you. You may want to keep that in your fridge just in case!
Here is a link and you should decide for your self what is good for you and what is not.
http://www.dairyconnection.com/commerce/catalog.jsp?catId=4
Most of the mold - read bacteria - in cheese occurs naturally in milk and is beneficial to be ingested. Actually your body needs it to digest stuff properly. The environment of an aging cheese is a lot like pickles, beer and wine with low PH and such. The bad critters find this environment hostile and if any do grow there it will be very evident.
Not to disagree with tubercle, but certain cheeses (like Bleu) most definitely do contain fungal mold in addition to bacteria.
I was just curious as to how you go about determining whether or not your cheese is actually growing the right culture, or how one creates an environment that is an eden to one kind of mold but not another, or if, in general, apathy is the best policy.
By the by, I’ve got nothing against lactobacillus. I have a bowl full of the little suckers on top of my fridge at this very moment, awaiting their imminent sacrifice to the bakery gods.
The fairly high salt content in cheese helps preserve it and retard spoiling. It’s a pretty harsh environment for most organisms.
Feel free to disagree with me anytime. I might actually learn something from it ;D
Yes, there are many type of mold and such associated with the cheese but think of the cheese environment like the beer environment. We hear “there is nothing that can grow in a healthy fermenting beer that will hurt you”. For some beer styles this extra growth is actually desirable. This is mainly because of the lack of O2. The interior of cheese is the same way. No O2 available for the harmful types to survive, especially in the aging process where the “good” bacteria and molds overwhelm the food supply just like a healthy dose of yeast does for beer. Finally the finished product gets to the point where the environment is just too hostile for even the good stuff to grow and live but the enzymes produced through their death continue to mature the cheese.
The exterior is a different story. Moisture and O2 is available. This is where salt content, drying to create a rind, waxing or vacuum sealing, etc…comes in. In the case of blues and other mold rind developed cheeses, again the predominate mold overwhelms through a controlled environment. Bad stuff can grow on the outside so attention is due. In order to get the blue mold to the interior (its actually already there, just not viable) the cheese has to be pierced to allow O2 inside to create the veining. Sometimes a bad, thus harmful, mold will get on the cheese. This is usually a black, fuzzy mold that is readily apparent that can be cut away or killed with a salt/vinegar solution.
Most of the deaths from “bath tub” cheeses are fresh cheeses (not aged) that are consumed immediately and bad sanitation practices or bad raw materials were used.
Wow, thanks for the info.
Sounds to me like home cheese making should be illegal.
Seriously though, what do you guys think about kids drinking raw milk? We have a gallon coming to a drop off point from an Amish farmer.
The wife now no longer wants to drink it because of the CDC’s warnings about consuming raw milk and cheeses made from raw milk.
Cheeses made from raw milk is safe and actually much better for you. They have to be aged at least 60 days by most state’s regulations. At that point the pH and all the other things I don’t understand makes the cheese where the baddies can’t grow.
Raw milk is getting a bad rap for some political reason. Don’t know what or who but somebody’s pocket is getting lined.
From Wikipedia:
"Pasteurization was first used in the United States in the 1890s after the discovery of germ theory to control the hazards of highly contagious bacterial diseases including bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis that was thought to be easily transmitted to humans through the drinking of raw milk.[1] Initially after the scientific discovery of bacteria, no product testing was available to determine if a farmer’s milk was safe or infected, so all milk was treated as potentially contagious. After the first test was developed, some farmers actively worked to prevent their infected animals from being killed and removed from food production, or would falsify the test results so that their animals would appear to be free of infection.[2]
When it was first used, pasteurization was thought to make raw milk from any source safer to consume. More recently, farm sanitation has greatly improved and effective testing has been developed for bovine tuberculosis and other diseases, making other approaches to ensuring safety of milk more feasible; however pasteurization continues to be widely used to prevent infected milk from entering the food supply."
Back to Tubercle:
Pasteurization kills all organism, good and bad. In raw milk, from what I have read, the good guys keep the bad guys at bay but after pasteurization its open to who ever gets there first. One example I read was to leave a container of raw milk and one of pasteurized on the counter over night. The raw is still safe to drink but the pasteurized is not. Actually leaving out raw milk over night is how you get the cream to separate. I guess it all comes down to handling practices. Raw anything; hamburger, fish chicken, all can be deadly if not handled and stored properly.