Question
I enjoy home cheesemaking, and often make fresh cheeses at home, including ricotta, paneer, queso fresco, and microwave mozzarella. I've stayed away from hard, aged cheeses to date because they appear to all require aging in a special cheese fridge. That is, every hard cheese recipe I've seen requires at least some aging at 55F / 13C. A regular fridge is too cold, and room temperature in our apartment ( 65F / 17C ) is too warm. But I live in a San Francisco apartment, so building a cheese-aging fridge is out of the question. There's no room.
Does anyone know of cheese types or techniques for making semi-soft or hard cheeses which can be aged either at regular fridge temperature, or at 17C room temperature?
Answer
The cheeses that just plain won't work in the fridge are those that make use of bacteria or mold with "special needs". Swiss, camembert, and any blue cheese come to mind. The bacteria that produce the holes in Swiss need specific, relatively warm, temps for specific times. Likewise the molds on the rinds or through blue cheeses need warmer but still cooler than room temperature.
Most semi-firm to firm cheeses can be aged just fine in a fridge. Many generic cheese recipes such as:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese98.htm
or
http://www.cheesemakingrecipe.com/Dutch.html
either say to age in the fridge or don't give a temperature at all and just say "age in a cool place".
In particular cheddar or gouda like cheeses age just fine in the fridge. Parmesan should also work but I personally haven't had the patience to wait the year necessary to try it.
Of course if generic-cheddar-like cheese isn't good enough and you want to recreate some particular cheddar that will be harder. Those recipes usually call for something like "Age for 6 months in this particular cave in France".
As for room temperature. I don't know. Room temperature at my house is 80F and no cheese will work with that.
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