There’s no polite way to say this: Cheese is high maintenance — as in arena-rocker high maintenance, like the kind of star who demands Cristal champagne, a licensed chiropractor and vanilla-scented candles backstage before the show.
Cheesemaking requires a pristine environment. All surfaces must be sanitized and disinfected. Same goes for the equipment, which must be scrubbed with an operating-room-like fervor. All other foodstuffs and tools used for food preparation must be banished from the area. No wooden spoons, either. Any one of those outsiders might sully the precious curds.
This pampering can go on for weeks. Aged cheese requires a cool — but not too cool! — environment with high humidity. Mold-ripened, bloomy cheeses like to be sprayed down to develop their speckled white complexions and require regular flipping to ensure that their outer skins, or rinds, are uniformly beautiful. If you fail at any one of those tasks, among many others, cheese can turn on you. And if you’ve really mistreated it, cheese might even make you sick.
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