Waxing unpoetic

[learnedax]

So, making the Derby wasn't that bad. The cheese press I built with new_man is simple but perfectly effective. Waxing it, though, that was terrible.

In the first place, if you wind up with a wheel of cheese that's not perfectly smooth, that has some craggy bits, or worse yet rough edges... brushing it with progressive layers of wax until there are no holes for air, and carefully examining the rough globs of wax you've layered on to see where there are genuine cracks and where there are merely lumpy bits is, at best, tedious. Nonetheless, I have a waxy red UFO happily aging in my fridge.

... but in the second place, cleaning wax off of the dishes, the sink, and the stove is if anything even more of a pain than getting wax onto the cheese in the first place. I'm still not thoroughly convinced I have everything scraped off. Surely there's some alternative to waxing that I can use next time...

Comments

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

Well, how committed are you to making it period-accurate? Would one of those vacuum plastic shrink wrap type things perform the same function?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I'm not too terribly concerned about production materials that are period, even when trying to create a period product. In point of fact there's not a huge amount of cheese documentation, so I mostly work from modern recipes for cheeses which are mentioned in period sources anyway. With that level of approximation, I'm happy to use a substitute that doesn't leave me swearing at cheese in the wee hours of the morning.

Do you need special tools to vacuum seal such a thing?

[tamarinne.livejournal.com]

I think you do, unfortunately. I have a mental picture in my head of some kind of infomercial where a perky host/ess is demonstrating a device that will suck all the air out of a plastic bag, essentially shrink-wrapping the food inside. And I'm not positive that would work for this purpose.

Perhaps there are cheese-based websites that could help.