Smoking cheese

[Steve]

Thanks Adam! Work is really crazy for me all of a sudden as well, so I understand!

I thought I remembered you and Peter discussing cheese smoking a while back, but a quick search didn't find the old thread and I didn't take time yet to do an exhaustive search. I look forward to hearing about your lessons learned though!
Have a great weekend!

Steve

Originally Posted by T.G

It's pretty wonderful.

But it, and any dry, hard, aged cheese has some caveats.

The more aged it is, the longer it will need to be left in a vacuum bag in the refrigerator after smoking to allow the smoke flavors to a) mellow and not overtake the cheese b) migrate through the cheese as to not just be a surface coating. Harder cheeses, the smoke doesn't absorb as well during the process, it just builds up on the surface.

I did some 36 month aged stuff once. It took well over a year in a vac bag in the refrigerator for the flavors to meld.

Smaller / thinner wedges/chunks will shorten that time, but you don't want to go too thin or you'll end up with too much surface area vs the core and it's easy to oversmoke and then you're right back to having to leave it in the refrigerator forever to mellow.



Steve, I'll post something this weekend on what I've learned that works for me. Too many work projects to wrap up today to get into a long post.

To quickly answer your question on what types, you can pretty much smoke any cheese except fromunda. Things like block size/weight, smoking time, and storage time before consuming can vary depending on the type of cheese though.