I love sharp cheddar cheese, but times are tough so I’ve been buying blocks of medium sharp and pretending it has more flavor than it really does.
It’s kind of like watching an Adam Sandler movie with the sound off - passable - but I know I’m only fooling myself, and not doing a very good job of it either.
Is there a way to age medium to sharp at home?
And, as long as we’re at it; is it possible to make a Sandler movie funny?
Here’s a Q&A from a blog in which store-bought cheese is mentioned: Cheese Wax Will Save Us All.
Don’t know if this will work with store-bought cheese, but I found this fascinating. (And yummy. Now I want brie on toast points. Mmmmm…melty brie…) : FAQs–Aging Cheese
Turn down the sound and play Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon?
As long as you’ve got somewhere with a stable, fairly cool temperature to store it, then there’s no reason why you can’t buy and age cheese yourself - a wine cellar, cool basement or maybe even a downstairs room on the north* facing side of a house.
It’ll work best if you can source whole cheeses which already have an intact wax covering or a fully developed hard rind. In the latter case, you may still have to brush the cheese mites off periodically.
*(Assuming you’re in the Northern temperate zone)
I placed a block of sharp cheddar in my basement about 4 years ago. When I find it again, I hope it’s extra sharp. Last I saw it, it had a bit of whitish plaques growing on it, that I assume is mold. I’ll cut that off and eat the rest.
Wherever it is.
WheneverI find it.
i think its under the staircase behind the Christmas wrapping.
I noticed at our local Walmart/Evil Empire store that mild, medium and sharp cheddar blocks were exactly the same price. That made no sense to me since I had assumed it took more effort ($$$) to make “sharp” versus “mild”, but it’s really just storage time.
I’ve done this with Edam cheese (whole, ball-shaped, waxed cheeses, that is). One full year at ~12 degrees C turned a rubbery, meh-tasting thing into an aromatic, tender, Edam-tasting real cheese. Great success. I’m considering to try this with cheddar as well, but I’m mentally preparing myself for failure, since I can only get those small, storebought, vacuum packed slices. I think that exposing that much surface to the environment (even if shielded by plastic) will lower the odds for success quite significantly.
I have an aging cheese at home…it’s constantly nagging me, and generally is a gigantic burden. When it was a young cheese, it was easy to live with, but as an aging cheese, it’s become cruel and bitter. I’m thinking about sending it off to live in a special home for aging cheeses
I applaud your ingenuity, but I’d suspect that attempting to make a better cheddar by aging individually-wrapped processed cheese slices falls into the same category as trying to polish a turd.
Most wrapped cheese slices are “pasteurized process cheese” or similar substances that have been made by pouring melted cheese, emulsifier, and other ingredients into a mold. I don’t think that home aging is going to do much to improve such a product.
(I’ve got nothing against pasteurized process cheese as a distinctive cheesy snack in its own right, but it is not going to behave or taste in every respect like traditional cheese.)
There are different types. The soft “squishy” processed cheese slices are as you describe, but you can also buy prepacked thin slices of real cheese (at least you can in the UK and pretty much everywhere in Europe), as well as the plastic-wrapped blocks of varying sizes.
Bad choice of wording on my side. I wasn’t thinking of the individually-wrapped slices, I was thinking of the narrow, rectangular pieces that look like a ~1cm thick slice/slab. I’ll have to search to find the individually-packed slices here, so that’s probably the cause for my bad choice of words.
Sorry for the confusion!
Sure, but you’ll feel guilty when it rolls off the bed one night and cracks its wax.
Oop sorry 2square, misunderstood you. Yes, I think that what is commonly known as a “brick” or “block” of real cheddar cheese would be a better bet for an aging experiment. But you may well still have too big a surface-area-to-volume ratio there for success.
(Mods, should this be shifted to Cafe Society while we’re at it?)