Cheese Type & Number: Stilton: #6

Description: A Stilton-type cheese. My second attempt. I will add CaCl and increase the amount of rennet. Also, I am switching milks.

Source of Recipe: Ricki Carrol

Date: 1/9/2004

Warming the Milk: 2 gallons whole Meadow Gold (from Walmart) plus 2 cups half-and-half, thoroughly mixed. Brought to 86

Today, Tuesday the 13th, this cheese had blue mold growing on it. I removed it from the mold sandwich, poked 25 holes in it using a sterilized wooden skewer, put it in a tupperware container and put it in the fridge downstairs. It seems very fragile and brittle, but we’ll see. I am now supposed to scrape the mold off of it weekly and age it, turning several times a week, for 4 months.

I really hope this cheese turns out!

A month later, this cheese has grown a blue mold all over the outside. I scraped this off once. The cheese seems to have a good flavor, although it needs more aging. But, it is becoming very soft and almost “melting” in the plastic container I keep it in. I turn it once a week or so and otherwise am ignoring it for now.

This cheese has really “melted”. The cheese has gotten very soft and become a bit runny—thick, like the interior of a good camembert, for example. We tasted some last night, and it was good in flavor (maybe some slight off after-taste), but I don’t think the cheese is going to last much longer.

I think I’ll try again, this time with a more traditional blue cheese.

Moving this cheese to a colder fridge helped it set up. We’ve given a lot of it away to friends who like strong blue cheeses and they love it! I think it is actually getting better with aging at the colder temperature. We are eating this cheese a couple of months early, so I don’t know what the eventual flavor and consistency would be. This one is good enough that it will be gone soon.

I will definitely try this cheese again, maybe using my current batch of blue mold that will expire in a couple of months.

Meantime, I’ve made a more traditional blue cheese last week and we’ll see what happens.