ROB KAUFELT and Brian Ralph were standing in a cool underground bunker below Murray’s Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village, giving a visitor a tour of five temperature-and-humidity-controlled cheese caves. The man-made chambers, they said, prevent many of the things that can go wrong with cheese when it is not handled properly.
Take slipskin. If a mold-ripened cheese is stored in a place that is too humid or warm, the mold that coats the outside can “grow very aggressively,” said Mr. Ralph, 26, the cave manager at Murray’s. “It gets thicker and thicker and it peels away from the paste.”
Or if Cheddar is ripened carelessly, he said, “sometimes it can turn sulfuric, kind of rotten-eggy.”
Mr. Kaufelt, who has owned Murray’s since 1991, said, “If it’s too dry, it can crack.”
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