Feeling Blue

I think I may have mentioned (once or twice) that the weather in the past few weeks has been, as the poet said, godawful. It has pelted down unremittingly for days and days, flooding the basement and causing the entire house to take on the faint scent of wet dog. A clash of weather fronts in the library caused it to rain inside my cave, where the cataract down the back wall promptly froze against the cooling element, requiring that I take the whole apparatus outside (yes, in the rain - are we detecting a theme, here?) to defrost it on the front lawn where a few additional gallons of water couldn't possibly do any harm.

It didn't really matter that I needed to unplug my fridge for a bit, since there was only one cheese remaining - the wax-dipped cheddar that I am saving for Christmas and was quite happy, during its home improvements, to spend a bit of time elsewhere.

But the revelation that I had only one cheese to call my own got me thinking. How better to spend a rainy weekend than up to one's elbows in a cheese vat?

That's a rhetorical question, of course.

Since the family have decided that Wensleydale is my signature cheese, I first made one of those.

Then, deciding I needed a new challenge (although I do plan to tackle mold-ripened fromage again prontissimo, I can't just now as various scheduling commitments make the constant vigilance required by such a project nigh on impossible until October).

But there was something I'd been meaning to try as soon as the weather got a bit cooler ... I seized my chance and made some Blue-Cheese-In-The-Style-Of-Stilton-Perhaps.

Why, you may ask? Although I don't claim to love blue cheese - in fact, I don't even like it very much - I'm surrounded by folks who do. Also, I confess to a scientific curiosity, rather like the one that motivated me to see how all the holes in Swiss cheese come about.

Haven't you ever wondered how a blue cheese gets its varicose veins?

I will tell you. They come from a little foil packet labelled penicillium roqueforti, easily purchased from the Cheese Queen and delivered right to one's door by one's friendly neighborhood UPS man. The powder within looks like the sort of mildew that festoons all the old textbooks stored in our swamp - sorry, I mean basement.

When you add the fungi to your beautiful raw milk, the milk turns blue:

It is quite unnerving.

The rest of the process seems designed to keep the cheese curds as porous, loose, slimy, and moist as possible, so that ideal spore-nurturing conditions will exist throughout the cheese. Instead of cooking the curds for ages and ages to dry them out, I simply scooped them into a cheesecloth bag and let them drain quietly for a couple of hours:

Instead of pressing them to oblivion in a small tomme, I merely applied an eight-pound workout weight to the whole unmolded mass:

The next morning, I had a big moist oozy pancake:

I tore it into little moist oozy pieces ...

... and lightly pressed them into my mold. I added a fetching (and very damp) cheesecloth chapeau to keep the whole thing moist:

After a few days of turning and draining, this was the result:

Instead of the utterly smooth protective rinds I rejoiced to see in my Swiss, Wensleydale, and cheddar cheeses (the less said about the rinds on my camemberts, the better) the surface of my BCSSP was full of holes and anfractuosities such that one could almost see to Leicestershire! Thus, life-giving oxygen might get all the way to the interior of the cheese, nourishing the little mold spores and encouraging them to do their worst.

Or best.

I'll know which in December.

Coming soon: just to be sure my cheese is adequately permeable, I attack it viciously with the sort of tiny knitting needle more commonly employed in the manufacturing of socks and gloves.