I have two cheese pots which don't go in the fridge and are never cleaned out - I merely add more cheese to them when they get low and keep them on a shelf in the kitchen.
One is for Stilton and has certainly not been cleaned in more than 3 years - I have written about this pot before. The cheese that matures in it is simply heavenly. The saving grace is that it doesn't smell much.
However, for the last 9 months I've been cultivating another pot for French Chaource cheese, which is a soft cheese I buy in Tesco. I discovered, purely by accident, that the taste of the cheese is dramatically improved by allowing it to rot slightly. Instead of washing the plastic tub out between cheeses, I left the detritus in so that it could quickly infect a new cheese, such that I had a perfect midden percolating within the pot inside 12 hours.
Things came to a head this weekend when Hay and No.1 Son complained about the smell from the opened tub, which I have to admit is very pungent (redolent of very mature socks) and fills the entire kitchen within seconds. It was probably a result of the very hot weather.
I washed the tub and replaced the cheese with a fresh round, but not before smearing a spoon in the old cheese and plunging it into the centre of the new one, thus seeding it with the right strain of bacteria. Hay thinks I'm dicing with death, but my gut biome must be fantastic - and I haven't yet caught Covid.... Yes, I know, correlation isn't causation, but you never know.
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