Affinage – 5 Tips to the Perfect Cheese Cave

Making cheese is exciting; making good cheese is hard.  It can feel like there is an unending list of challenges in creating that perfect wheel: milk quality, viable cultures, and sanitized equipment.  With supervision, mozzarella, chèvre, fromage blanc and ricotta can be a great place to start, as the cheese goes quickly from stockpot to mouth (although, Quick Mozzarella is quite temperamental and is typically frustrating for the beginner).  As the home cheese maker progresses, semi-hard and hard cheese styles (i.e., Cheddar, Gouda, Comté) pose a new challenge: appropriate aging techniques.

Affinage is the art of aging and maturing cheese.  This French term combines the many facets of the cheese ripening process: temperature, humidity, and handling (i.e., washing, brushing, turning).  It is the affineur, whose expertise in milk quality, ruminants, local flora and the terroir, who rears the wheel into a delicious, protein-packed food.  However, you don’t need to be an affineur to produce fantastic wheels at home.

For the home creamery, a wine fridge with programmable temperature is absolutely the way to go.  These small refrigerators come in a variety of sizes and often have a nice windowed door for impressing guests.  As you progress into this next level of cheese making, here are 5 tips for home affinage:

1. Wine fridges (or wine coolers) are often listed by their bottle capacity. What may be most important is the layout of those bottles.  A fridge that is two-bottles wide will fit at most a two-pound wheel; for example, when using a one kilogram Kadova mold or a generic small tomme mold.  A fridge that is three-bottles wide or more will fit a four to five pound wheel; for example, when using a one-and-a-half to two kilogram Kadova mold or a generic large tomme mold.  Be sure to pick a cheese cave that will fit your cheese wheels.

2. Total bottle capacity of the wine fridge is also important: Too large of a wine fridge will make it challenging to maintain humidity. Adding small dishes of water will help, but cannot maintain the appropriate humidity levels (80 to 90 percent for hard and semi-hard cheeses).  Draping extra cheesecloth from a water dish usually only results in moldy cloth.  Working against you is the cooling system, which also removes moisture – experience has shown that plugging the drain has not proved successful.  Ultimately, the best results were found by keeping the fridge 60 to 75 percent full.

3. Wine fridges have the drawback of shipping with wavy shelves, designed for storage of bottles rather than wheels of cheese. With narrower fridges, construction of better fitting cheese-perfect wooden shelves is much easier.
   For fridges with wider dimensions, stacking the provided racks with dollar store cooling racks and/or cutting boards can create a flat surface perfect for aging cheese.  Furthermore, it is recommended to use plastic draining mats over bamboo, as there is less chance of mold taking over.

4. Air movement is quite important in affinage – stagnant air will cause the wheels to mold, while too much air movement will dry them out. The fans in the fridge will unfortunately blow air directly onto the back-most wheels; this is obviously not optimal air movement.  Try covering the entire inside-back of the fridge with a cheesecloth – this will help disburse the fan’s air flow move evenly around the wheels.  And, at a minimum, avoid placing wheels near the fans.

5. Finally, it will be wise to have dedicated fridges for certain cheese types. Beware the blue cheese molds, like Penicillium roqueforti, as they are extremely invasive; once that culture has taken hold in your cheese cave, each new wheel will be a new source of food for this microorganism. Know that brie and camembert, which use Penicillium candidum, can also produce spores that may make a home in a wine fridge, but there is rarely a reason to be upset about that.

It is important to note that others have also found success with mini-fridges by manipulating the thermostat or overriding the power supply.  Both are uncomplicated adjustments, but electrically cumbersome, nevertheless.

Advancing from fresh cheeses to aged cheeses is a big step for any cheesemaker.  Investing in the right cave is critical to your continued success.  Bon affinage!