That is the fast way. Normally it should be aged when it's still a head of cheese and not a slice in someone's fridge. Far as I can tell that takes more than a year, just because it's such a big head of cheese. The advantage of aging a mere slice is that it ages many times faster.
It is also much harder to make a good aged cheese then a good fresh cheese. There's a lot more chance for bad bacteria to contribute a bad flavor or spoil the cheese if you give it more time.
Speaking as the son of a small commercial cheesemaker, who started out (~23 years ago) making cheddar that only stayed good for about a week in the fridge. Now we make aged cheddar.
The article doesn't specifically require mold; it only argues that mold is safe if the cheese is hard and salty. It's more about how cheese that's been forgotten in the fridge actually continues to age and develop flavors -- a poor man's cheese-aging cave.
The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.
Depends on the cheese, and on the usage, really. My mom works at a cheese factory, so I regularly get more cheese than I know what to do with, so most of it ends up in the freezer. Non-aged cheese (not familiar with the English terminology, sorry) is absolutely no problem to freeze in my experience. Aged cheese, at least the ones I eat, crumbles completely after defrosting, absolutely impossible to slice - but I only use aged cheese for pizza and other stuff that goes into the oven, so the fact that it falls apart just by touching it is more of a feature for me - no need to grate it!
There's no official ripe date, and French cheese-mongers typically state the date of packaging to give the customer a general idea of what to expect. Young and aged mimolette have significant differences in texture and taste.
my grandfather who happily let his cheese age on the countertop until larvae appeared because it improved the taste would not be shocked at all by that.
Cheese is typically aged but after it already became cheese by curling (usually using renit) and undergoing some fermentation.
In parts of the world where you can get raw milk (ie not the us) milk sours and becomes something like buttermilk. Some farmers cheeses are made from raw milk that has curdled in this way.
In the us, milk is pasteurized completely enough that it rots instead of souring. I believe this phrase is American in origin, and is intended to be in contrast to the phrase “ages like fine wine”. Whatever the case milk does not become better milk with time.
Sadly, it looks like a significant amount of the cheese in cold storage is American and Swiss [1] – they missed a fantastic opportunity to age cheddar en masse.
>I've found that the white has a higher melting point than the orange, usually, so a big block of sliced white american cheese holds up well.
This is my experience as well. I still buy the yellow cheese because its lower melting point is more suitable for rapidly melting over things I want to melt it over.
Even though the theoretical shelf life may be the same regardless of packaging the block of cheese in a ziplock from the deli will go bad faster than wrapped singles, probably extra air (the same way bread in a large container goes stale faster than bread in a bag) and possibly because of a difference in preservatives. In practice singles have a much longer shelf life.
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