My favorite way to store cheese

by Jen

I love cheese, but I can only eat so much at a time. I especially like some of the moderately pricey ones like smoked gouda (seen here). But I would rarely treat myself because whenever I buy even the smallest wedge or wheel available, it goes off before I can finish it.

Then I figured out why it was going bad: plastic. Cheese comes in plastic wrappers these days. What is a traditional wheel of cheese covered in? Not plastic, but wax. That’s where I got the idea: wax paper inside tin foil.

Not that you need pictures to do this, but I took some, so here they are, along with instructions:

How to wrap cheese

Take your wheel of cheese and lay it out on a nice big sheet of wax paper. Put the cheese at one end of the wax paper, and roll it over a couple of times so it’s securely wrapped:

Now fold down the ends the way you would if you were wrapping a present, and tuck them under one side.

Now, flip that over onto a sheet of tin foil the same size as your wax paper. I put the folded side of the wax paper against the middle of the tin foil so that if the tin foil comes open, the wax paper won’t come open under it and expose the cheese. Next, fold two ends of the tin foil over the cheese. Pinch the ends together and fold them under so it’ll keep securely closed:

Here’s what it looks like when you’re done with that step:

Then fold the ends under like you would a present.

Any cheese I’ve tried this with will keep for at least a week. Some cheeses keep even longer. And by “keep”, I mean they neither mold nor dry out. You can open them up, cut off a piece and put them back as often as you want.

Is the tin foil necessary? Maybe not – you could use a rubber band, for example, to keep the wax paper from coming open. I like the tin foil because wax paper can tear when you move other things against it in the refrigerator.

Related posts:

1. How to tell blue cheese has gone bad
2. You can make your own paneer cheese?
3. Recipe for pumpkin spice cream cheese
4. Re-using backs of paper
5. Stop using plastic to store food?

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Posted in Easy Food on January 21, 2010
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