Crayon cheese tasting

Rummaging through my refrigerator this morning trying to find something interesting to go with my bread my eyes fell on the crayon cheese I made back in early May. It had been sitting in the back of the fridge and out of site ever since, the idea being that good cheese needs to age, a month at a minimum. Actually, make that two months and beyond, one month was merely the estimate how long it would take for the cheese to be any good at all.

Well, there it was, pink as on its first day, and definitely at least a month old. Of course I was curious how it had turned out beneath that pink paraffin shell. And not only that, I have actually designs on making another one. But only if this experiment was any good at all. Making cheese had proven time consuming after all, and before doing it again I would want some reassurance it would not be an effort wasted. So I decided it was time to put that cheese to the test.

Just cutting that cheese left me under the impression the cheese was very dry and not creamy at all. No big surprise here considering that I had made that cheese from half fat milk. Normal cheese is not only made from full fat milk, it often also has extra cream added. Also, the interior of the cheese was still as white as on the day that I had waxed it, not yellowish as I would have expected it. Most other hard cheeses are yellow mine was not. Why not? I do not know.

The next step after cutting a wedge off of my cheese was to peal the wax from it. I quickly noticed that using colored paraffin for cheese wax was less than an optimal solution. It is a solution as it did keep my cheese from spoiling. No nasties were growing on it and that was good. It did not smell rooten or spoiled and that was even better. But the paraffin shell was difficult to peel off. The main problem with it was that it was very brittle, breaking easily into tiny pieces as I tried to pull it off. It took quite a while to get most of the paraffin off the cheese, and many of the tiny pieces never came off at all and wound up as part of my meal instead.

And then, the cheese itself. It does have a little aroma but definitely not very much. Similar for the taste: It has taste but it is not strong at all. A little bit like a very mild cheddar. It goes well with my bread but then, any commercial cheese goes well with bred, too. So while my cheese is not bad I would definitely prefer it to be more assertive: With a stringer aroma, and definitely with a stronger taste.

I am hoping that both aroma and taste are a function of aging. Meaning that given more time ripening in the back of the fridge there will be more aroma and more taste. As to why my cheese remained white instead of turning more toward yellow I don't know. Neither do I care much: If I can get the aroma and the flavor right I won't care much what the color is, and after all, white is still a lot better than a lot of other colors I can think of. So I will assume the missing piece is extra aging. And I am even going to put it to a test, by making another, and then waiting longer before I eat it.

But before trying again I need some real cheese wax. While that crayon in the paraffin that I used was non toxic I still did not like it too much in my cheese. Finding real cheese wax may turn out to be somewhat of a challenge but it will definitely be worth it. At least that much I am sure about.