Cheese: A Fridge Too Far?
December 17, 2008
So the lettuce seedlings died, and the salad leaves and kale survived. I use the term ’survived’ loosely as the kale was just banished to the balcony by my cohabiter where they will presumably perish. I would have put them in the greenhouse only the outside parsley is streets ahead of the greenhouse parsley so I’m favouring the outside at the moment. Either way, maybe the dead of winter is not the time to concern oneself emotionally with cultivating leafy green vegetables.
In the meantime, I thought it was about time to embark on the next folly: cheese. After much lofty ambitions of fashioning cheese making tools out of things laying around my general living area, I sold out and bought a cheese making kit online. not wanting to quite relinquish all of my stubbornness, I aim to make soft mold-ripened cheese only. For those that don’t know, these cheeses are generally about a 6 to 8 out of 10 in terms of amateur cheese making difficulty. They also happen to be my favourite.
The reason the type of cheese is important for this post is that part of the soft cheese making process involves keeping the cheese at a constant temperature and humidity for a significant period of time (think weeks and months rather than days). Humidity can be controlled to a certain extent through the addition of, well, water to make a space more humid and some kind of material which soaks the water out of the air (salt for example) to reduce humidity.
Temperature is a little more tricky. The ideal temperature for soft cheese making is about 7/8 Degrees Celsius. Any less and the bacteria won’t grow, any more and the bacteria will grow, but alongside other unwanted bacteria. This is higher than most kitchen fridges which are about 4 Degrees. To be honest, purposefully cultivating bacteria amongst the vegetables didn’t seem intuitively like the smartest thing to do anyway. I decided I needed a second, smaller fridge. I didn’t really want a tiny AC one and the under-counter bar-style fridges were a little pricey. I turned my attention to a Freecycle website and managed to rescue a fine big fridge from a landfill-shaped destiny.
It smells a bit odd and is the last thing we need in our 60 square metres, but I managed (somehow) to get this past the committee in my particular apartment and now it sits next to the boiler in the utility room.
It has a a thermostat knob like most not-too-fancy fridges which goes from 1-5, but no indication of what temperature these settings might represent. I used a resistance thermometer to measure the temperature at three different shelves, for five thermostat settings.
While there is an obvious downward trend in the higher thermostat settings (as you’d expect), the readings weren’t as consistent as I was expecting. I did a second experiment where I took a single spot close to what I guessed would be good for cheese and measured it a number of different times. I have also recorded the times associated with these measurements, but they were not on the same day or at regular intervals. (hey this isn’t work – cheese making isn’t a precise science, right?)
There is a much bigger deviation than I would have expected taking a single spot and a single thermostat setting. Perhaps the fridge is being effected by the hot water in the house – it’s right next to the boiler after all – and it can’t keep up with the external temperature changes. Maybe the external temperatures don’t matter at all and the thermostat is just not able to regulate temperature in any consistent manner. That would seem to be good grounds to give away a fridge on Freecycle!
I’m still a bit puzzled but let’s hope that it will do the trick for the moment. Next challenge is to build up the courage to actually make the cheese and unbox that kit that has been sitting on a shelf for the last two weeks.
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Very interesting – I bought a cheese kit this summer – and didn’t realise the rennet, etc needed to go in the fridge – but it’s there now, waiting for me to get a chance. I’m hoping to make mozarella, which seems pretty easy – havene’t taken any time to worry about the constant temp and humidity, looking forward to seeing your adventures. I’m expecting my first efforts to flop, but there’s only one way up from that…
As for your parsley and Kale – I’d be willing to bet your kale does Ok, and starts to produce leaves for you late Feb, if you have it in deeper soil than a seedling tray. They biggest problem this time of year is lack of light, and indoor lights don’t work that well for growth. I’d imagine that your greenhouse parsley is getting less light than the one outside…
Thanks for your comments! I agree with you in terms of light. Even in the summer we don’t get direct light after about 2/3 in the afternoon so the greenhouse is more being used as a storage area of sorts at the moment and the things I want to grow are outdoors. The kale is in window box type containers – much bigger than seed trays but still perhaps not as voluminous as I would like. I may also put the corn salad leaves outside and see how they fair.
If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.