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.

[mermaidlady]

I vaguely remember cheesemaking in Little House in the Big Woods where the cheeses were sewn into cloth wrappers. That's not airtight, so I think the wrappers were coated with something, probably not wax though, maybe some sort of fat. I can look it up later.

[dreda.livejournal.com]

What about wax-imbued cheesecloth? I'm quite sure that some of the wax for some of the cheeses I buy has little woven fibers in it, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch...

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I will have to investigate. It's possible my local supplier of cheesemaking paraphernalia has something like that...

[jamey1138.livejournal.com]

Right-- my sweetie is much for of a cheesemaker than I am, but my understanding is that some cheeses are meant to age airtight, and others aren't.

I'd worry a bit about the vacuum sealed plastics, only because they need to do a *really* good job of conforming to the cheese (usually, they get *almost* all the air out, and created low-pressure pockets in the places that don't get completely evacuated...) On the plus side, you'd have absolute knowledge, later, if it was a botched job (because the plastic would re-inflate, as the bacteria breath...)

My suggestion would be to continue to work with wax, but to set up a better work area for it (might not be feasible to build a whole waxing room or something, but the lowest-impact version would be to get a bunch of tin-foil cooking pans, and use them to build a good box, at least around 3/4 of the work area...)

[rising-moon.livejournal.com]

How about wrapping the cheese in cheesecloth, tying a string around it, dipping the whole thing in wax, then placing it on a drying rack/mesh/cloth/thingie like an enormous chocolate?

It's overdoing it, perhaps, with the wax, creating irregularities and big ends and so forth. Just a thought.

[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.