Need advice on keeping cheese

Hi friends!

The boyfriend just came back from Wisconsin with a treasure trove of cheese *drool* He got a ton of cheese and I don't think we'll be finishing them within the next week or so. Can I freeze cheese or is refrigeration sufficient to preserve it for some time? Thanks y'all!

You can freeze cheese, but for some cheeses, freezing can make the texture funky.

Refrigerated shelf life of cheese varies by type of cheese, but I would think a Wisconsin cheddar, for instance, will last for at least 10 days in a refrigerator without any problems. I have a huge block of Tillihook cheddar that The Wife bought from Costco weeks ago, and I still am eating off it and have detected no deterioration.

Hammond

Freezing cheese tends to make the cheese grainy and sometimes have a tendency to crumble. This can be good if you want to crumble blue cheese on a salad but bad if you want to use a slab of blue on a cheese platter. Emmenthaler and gruyere become grainy but easier to grate for melting. In any case thaw frozen cheese slowly in the refrigerator.

ekreider wrote:This can be good if you want to crumble blue cheese on a salad but bad if you want to use a slab of blue on a cheese platter.

I don't think I'd want to put a slab of previously frozen cheese on a cheese platter. As you suggest, it'd be best to use for cooking, when its integrity would melt away anyway.

Hammond

Any cheese over 48% fat can be frozen, or so I've heard and behaved. Soft cheeses such as brie, camembert, etc. can quite safely be frozen: but wrap them ever so carefully in *real* Saran wrap (it is opaque to O2). I've kept it for a year at -5°F.

The mold exterior gets a bit ungie, but otherwise the cheese is whole and entire.

I know of no way to successfully freeze cheddar cheeses: freezing breaks up whatever binding there is between cheddared bits, and you end up with a defrosted pile of bits.

If memory serves, Stilton will freeze ok, but not perfectly.

Geo

Geo wrote:Any cheese over 48% fat can be frozen, or so I've heard and behaved. Soft cheeses such as brie, camembert, etc. can quite safely be frozen: but wrap them ever so carefully in *real* Saran wrap (it is opaque to O2). I've kept it for a year at -5°F.

The mold exterior gets a bit ungie, but otherwise the cheese is whole and entire.

I know of no way to successfully freeze cheddar cheeses: freezing breaks up whatever binding there is between cheddared bits, and you end up with a defrosted pile of bits.

If memory serves, Stilton will freeze ok, but not perfectly.

Geo

Is that how Kraft came up with those vile 'Crumbles'? I guesss one of their thermostats went crazy and froze a warehouse.

Flip

My favorite salad trick involves freezing blue cheese - with higher moisture content. Roquefort, maytag, point reyes original -- all will work well. When the time comes to serve the salad, simply grate on a plane and voila, the most perfect shreds of blue that will defrost quickly without deterioration. Looks nice on the rim of a plate.

I generally don't advocate freezing cheese. Buy only as much as you can eat, if possible. The exception may be fresh goat cheese, which does freeze well. Not too much deterioration in texture, but flavor will be impacted over time.