Adding a bit of sodium hexametaphosphate is good if you want to make cheese slices or blocks of cheese. Increases the firmness of the final product a bit and slices easier.
The big fun tidbit is the 40-year-old cheddar from Wisconsin, forgotten in a walk-in cooler.
When it comes to food, you want margin for error. You want your home, your store, your agriculture system, etc to have more food than is necessary. Because if something goes wrong, you have a bit of slack before everyone starves.
If your system produces the “perfect” amount of food with no waste, it means the very first crop failure, trucking disruption, etc. puts you into a dire situation.
I’d rather throw out a thing of moldy cheese once in a while.
I just don't get why people buy mountains of food. It is not just food waste, but money waste as well, and most people ought to respond to financial incentives.
Consider how highly engineered and processed many modern foods are, to maximize their "addictiveness". Assume that the not-so-benevolent geniuses behind that trend have also put some real work into encouraging wasteful over-purchasing of their food products.
Just in case was either war or supply chain issue or crops issue. Just about only people who did not had that could not afford it.
Buying just right amount of food for next two days is modern behavior.
We waste our time on addictive social networks which are not exactly nourishing. We may be doing the same with our money on highly processed food which does not nourish us well either.
:-D
What is remarkable with Roquefort is the penicilium roquforti and the fact that it is not that dry. Many dry cheese can be aged and should be to develop their aromas (Comté, parmiggiano...etc).
One more parameter that I find often overlooked is temperature : aromas and texture are much better at room more than fridge temperature. If you can get your cheese out of the fridge 30min-1h before consuming, you will enjoy it much more. Edit: typo
It did not even depend on the cheese, all of them does not taste good to me when warm.
Hard cheeses are fine if you just scrap one or two millimetres in the worst cases. Soft cheeses are supposed to have a thriving mould population from the beginning, which prevents a lot of nasty things to develop. The riskiest are cheeses you are supposed to eat very young like cottage cheese. These can be aged with the right culture, but it’s unlikely to happen by chance and they get foul very quickly otherwise.
You should be more upset that a simple ER visit could cost you any money at all, to be honest.
It isn't like I'm going to start playing Food Poisoning Roulette any time soon. But if I happen upon some bad food, there is a limit to the expenses occurred.
And overall, I'm OK with this. I'd rather help folks when they need it even if they didn't make perfect choices than leave folks suffering - and make sure their kids aren't growing up watching their parent physically suffer because the parent messed up when they was younger.
That said, many cheeses that keep well just end up tasting like amonia if you allow them to ripen too long. As a cat owner, that's just a no-go for me.
I am so glad I don't live in US.
