After a week of turning, rewrapping and pressing our cheese every night we’ve finally taken it out of the press. It looks fantastic. A little white, perhaps – a bit like the outside of a brie – but nice and firm. It smells good, too.
I really want to get into it now, but we’re a long way from that yet. Now we have to wait, allowing it to mature for at least four weeks and, if we want a really mature cheese, as much as ten. All through that time we’ll have to keep it somewhere cool and slightly damp. On that score, the outhouse is perfect.
We’ll still have to turn it every day and make sure that the skin is well oiled to keep it good, and to make it easier to remove any mould that forms.
Oiling our cheese
This is perhaps the most exciting thing we’ve made. More exciting even than the yoghurt, which I have to admit got me rather chatty.
The piece above, which is about four inches across and a couple of inches deep, was the product of almost five litres of milk. Hang on, though – weren’t we making cheese with just one litre of milk originally? Well, yes, we were. We made two – that one and this one – which is just as well as that other cheese got somewhat crushed in the press. It was a valuable lesson: less is most certainly more, and you should only ever press it down until the whey just starts to run or else you could end up squeezing it through the sides of the press.
So, when can we eat it? Certainly no earlier than 14th March. That feels like ages.
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