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

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

It would take, I think, a rather large pool of wax to effectively dip four pounds of cheese. I tried a little piecemeal dipping, without the cloth, as it's one method suggested by my source, but getting uniform coverage that way was not actually much easier. I assume it would work a bit better if I could just submerge the whole thing, but that's like 6 litres of melted wax...

[rising-moon.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking submersion would be the quickest way to ensure full coverage and few air bubbles. But I was thinking more along the lines of a small brie... four pounds is a big cheese, and that's a lot of wax.

I'll be curious to see how the other methods turn out.

[laurion]

Could you create a trough slightly deeper than half a wheel, and then roll it in the trough? That should dramatically reduce the size and volume of the container you need.

[laurion]

Mmm. To be clear, it would be much better to do this with the wheel in a vertical orientation, like a spinning wheel, and not a horizontal one, like a pottery wheel.