The cheese was placed in our cheese cave (aka a small wine refrigerator) and left to age. I should have been checking the humidity, monitoring the temperature, and just generally keeping an eye on our Asiago-to-be. The key word here is 'should' .. should have, but did not. Sadly, work and life got busy and our little cheese was forgotten for weeks at a time punctuated by realizations of "oh my god! The cheese! I haven't checked the temperature!"
Luckily, when it came time to taste the young Asiago nothing too bad had happened. The tougher rind gave way to a creamy-but-firm interior speckled with a peppercorn or two. The flavor was mild and salty but still identifiably Asiago.
Could it be? Did our cheese thrive despite the neglect? Was it really as simple as placing young cheese in a improvised cheese cave and forgetting about it?
This month's Cheesepalooza challenge was to make Gruyere at home. We hadn't even started making the cheese and I already knew it would be hard to refrain from cutting open the finished cheese to see if it was forming the signature holes inside it yet.
Part of the cheesemaking process is allowing the cheese to age. Cheese needs to sit for months, and sometimes years to get those complex flavors and interesting textures. It needs patience combined with weekly check-ins to see how it's developing.
It doesn't need some food blogger opening the cheese cave door every couple of hours to manhandle it and debate whether it would be possible to just eat it right now and not tell anyone what happened. Some cheese ages in peace (other people's cheese) and some cheese is constantly harassed (my cheese).
Suddenly buying cheese that's 2,3, or sometimes 6 years old is mindblowing. Someone waited SIX YEARS before slicing into this cheese? I've been dying for the last four weeks to check out my cheddar, never mind if I had to wait until I was 33 to try it!
For me, Asiago is the cheese that accidentally makes it's way into my shopping cart when I was supposed to buy Parmesan. The two cheeses look so similar and are often right on top of each other in the displays that sometimes it's not until I'm tossing the wrapper from the finished cheese that I notice it was Asiago all along.
Sneaky, sneaky Asiago.
Regardless of the possibly sinister nature of this cheese, I was excited that it was chosen for this month's Cheesepalooza challenge. The recipe makes two little wheels of cheese; one to eat after a few weeks when the cheese is young and another to age to that crumbly, parmesan-ish texture. I've found that I'm pretty impatient with the whole "aging for months on end" process so the prospect of trying the cheese early appealed to me.
As the cheese making challenges progress, the recipes get a little bit more time consuming. With our farmhouse cheddar we had issues with the instruction to bring the temperature of the cheese curds up only a few degrees over the course of 40 minutes. Although we got through it just fine (after putting out a mayday help help plea on twitter) this time we employed some advice from a fellow cheesemaker and used a hot water bath in our sink to slowly and evenly increase the milk's temperature.
Look at our sweet set up: digital thermometers for monitoring both the milk and water temperatures. You could actually see the heat transfer from the water to the milk when the temperature of the water would drop by a degree at the exact same time that the milk temperature rose one degree. The most interesting science is the kind that gives you cheese when all the learning is done.
Before I started this cheese making challenge I had never considered what went in to making cheddar. I would casually throw a brick (or two) into my shopping cart without wondering why cheddar tastes so different from mozzarella or brie or Parmesan when they are all made with basically the same ingredients. I was living in a state of cheese ignorance.
But thanks to this month's Cheesepalooza challenge, my mom and I have a better idea of what steps are needed to create those familiar orange blocks. Since we still have the aging process ahead of us I can't really declare that we have successfully made cheddar yet, but we certainly got a few wheels of it started.
It all began with 16L of milk. Creamy, unhomogenized, organic whole milk that nearly broke my fingers off while I was carrying it all to the car. 16 liters is heavier than I thought it would be.
There are a lot of recipes for homemade mozzarella floating around out there. From traditional mozza recipes that take literally all day and require constant monitoring of the cheese's pH levels to ensure proper stretching to 30 minute mozza recipes that come together in a flash.
For this month's Cheesepalooza challenge my mom and I wanted to try a recipe that we could succeed at despite being cheese making novices. That ruled out the the all-day mozza marathon or any recipe requiring pH strips.
We decided to use a recipe from A Canadian Foodie's website that not only looked like it made some dreamy mozza, but also came with a ton of tips to help out first time mozza-makers.
The recipe starts out with 4L of non-homogenized milk. I bought 4L of 2% milk and 4L of whole milk so that we could make a batch of each and then conduct taste tests to see which cheese was better. Not because I needed an excuse to eat more cheese, it was in the name of science.
