Cheshire is a style of cheddar. It is actually the cheese used in Welsh Rarebit, which I always thought involved “rabbit”. Up until recently that was enough to keep me away. Now I will happily eat rabbit, especially after Neal and Kathy Foley of Claddaugh Farms in Montville, Maine cooked me up the most delicious paella with rabbit, sausage and lobster. But anyway, Welsh Rarebit has no meat in it. It is simply cheese (Cheshire) melted with beer, some flour, mustard powder and worcestershire sauce. Mixed together after melting, spread on toast and broil or bake. Sounds delicious, right? Just as delicious as that rabbit paella.
Anyhow, when I say cheddar, cheddar refers to a process called “cheddaring”. Without going into it too deeply, all cheese pretty much starts out the same. Milk, bacteria, rennet and salt. And even as you innoculate milk with bacteria, add the rennet to gel the curds and cook the curds, most cheese is still pretty much the same thing from batch to batch. Cheddaring refers to the what you do with the curds. Once your curds are ready, you basically stack them on top of each other and heat them at a temperature of our 90 degrees for a few hours. What you are doing is creating acid in the curds…you are getting the bacteria to eat the lactose in the milk and create lactic acid. This is what gives cheddar the sharp flavor (aging does that, too). Once the curds are “cheddared”, you put them in a press and with time and pressure, you create a wheel of cheese that you can age.
So we just made a wheel of cheshire. It will now age until camp, which is 10 months away, which means that it will be excellent.
On tap for the next make is brie, gruyere and manchego.
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