Now that I have a dedicated cheese cave that Santa so generously gave me this past Christmas, I took another chance with brie (or cambembert, or more generally a white mold rennetted cheese). I made this on 3/16/11 with 1 gallon TJ's organic whole milk, 1 pint of TJ's organic heavy cream, flora danica (thanks to my aunt for christmas as well), CaCl, and rennet. My molding process definitely could use some improved hardware, but I managed to create 3 small disks and two spheres. They dried in their moulds, were salted, and sat for a bit more on the kitchen counter at room temp in a plastic box for about 4 days. Now they reside in their cozy cheese cave (aka tiny wine cooler).
Here they are at 1 week old (temp at about 48* F and humidity too low at around 82%).Since the humidity should be more like 90%, I put a star-san soaked paper towel on the bottom. After a couple days, I didn't see the humidity rise, so I added more star-san to it, and added another wadded-up star-san soaked paper towel to the shelf with the spheres. Hopefully that does the trick. The white mold seems to be starting to grow, so maybe it's just fine... I just want to make sure the white mold gets happy and makes some creamy gooey brie!
We'll see how they turn out in 4 or 5 more weeks. I figure the small sphere might be worth checking soon - have it on my calendar for April 6. The others should probably go to April 20 or 27 - again, I put it in my calendar so I don't forget.
