Cheddar Baby is 1… Such a Big Cheese!

Traditional Cheddar, aged 1 year.

Aside from the images I show here on the blog, I tend to post a lot pictures of the cheeses I make on Facebook for my friends and family to gawk at. They scroll by on the news feed along with numerous pictures of the many, many babies my friends are having. Yep, I’ve hit that age when everyone I know seems to be popping out babies.  There’s a new one every day. It’s just joyous. (You can read that with sincerity or sarcasm, as you choose.)

Well, I don’t have any adorable baby pictures to share… or even any pictures of babies-only-a-mother-could-love. But I do have cheese. And it’s just as chubby, milk-scented, and non-ambulatory as your bundle of joy. And I can eat mine. So there.

No, really, your babies are very cute and I mean no offense, but I’m very proud of my cheese babies, too. And so I’m excited to announce that one of my progeny has hit a very big milestone. The Traditional Cheddar I made last February just turned ONE! Awww, such a big cheese!

I made the cheese using the traditional method of “cheddaring” (stacking and flipping) blocks of matted curd, which I blogged about at the time. The cheddaring produced some pretty dense, rubbery slabs of cheese, which I then cut into chunks and milled with salt. The process served to remove a lot of moisture from the cheese and made some of the firmest, squeakiest curds I’ve produced yet. They all went into the press and it took a lot of weight to get all those individual cheese curds to form into a wheel. Then I waxed it and set in the cave, where it’s been flipped weekly and left to mature for a whole year.

Yesterday, I decided to open the one-year-old wheel in honor of a friend’s 30th birthday. As I told him, the occasion called for something equally well aged. The cheese turned out quite well. For having been sitting around a year, it had very little mold under the wax (much less than other wheels I’ve aged for shorter amounts of time). Some of the white spots on the exterior of the cheese I think may even have been salt crystals rather than mold, which shows the transformations the cheese goes through as it ages – all the fats and salts and flavor shifting and transforming. One of my favorite things is a hard cheese that has the nice crystalline crunch of salt crystals throughout. My Traditional Cheddar didn’t quite achieve that level of perfection, but it is very good. It’s hard. It’s dry. It’s flaky, but not crumbly. And it’s legitimately sharp, with a consistent flavor that has no hint of sourness. It’s thirst-inducing and makes you long for a little beer. It’s a solid cheddar and I’m oh so proud.

So, shall we set up a play date?