Cutting the first hard cheese at six months
The wheel went into the hallway fridge on 24 March weighing 1,410 g, after a day in brine and two days drying on the kitchen counter. It came out this morning weighing 1,085 g. That is a loss of just under a quarter of its weight in six months, which is about what I had read to expect for a small natural-rind cheese kept at 12 °C and roughly 85 per cent humidity, measured with a cheap hygrometer sitting next to it.
The rind had been the worry all along. In the first three weeks it grew patches of white and then blue-grey mould, which I brushed off every Sunday with a dry nailbrush kept only for that job. By week six it had settled into a dry, mottled brown-grey skin with a few spots of white that came back each week and were brushed back each week. It never went slimy and never smelled of anything worse than a damp cellar. In month four a small crack opened on one face, which I rubbed with a little olive oil and which did not spread.
Cutting it was a surprise in both directions. The paste is a pale straw colour, firm but not hard, and it cut cleanly with a knife rather than crumbling. There are a dozen or so small mechanical openings, irregular slits the size of a grain of rice, which I understand come from curds that did not quite knit under the press. That matches what I remember of the pressing: the follower sat unevenly and one side of the wheel ended up thicker than the other, and the openings are all on the thick side. Under the rind for about 3 mm the paste is darker and drier, and that band tastes stronger than the middle.
The taste is mild, nutty and slightly sweet in the centre, saltier and sharper under the rind, with a faint bitterness right at the edge that I think is the rind itself. It is not any cheese I could name, which I am told is the normal result of a first hard cheese. It is unmistakably cheese, though, and good enough that half of it went in a week.
For the next wheel: a flat, rigid follower cut from a chopping board so the pressure is even; a slightly warmer cook, perhaps 39 °C rather than 38, for a drier curd; and the patience to leave it eight months. The second wheel went into the fridge in June, so that one comes out in February.