Friday, May 27, 2011

New Cheese Cave


It has been a while since I posted. This doesn't mean I have been sitting on my laurels. I have made quite a few cheeses and ate quite a bit of it too. I have also been working on the construction of the creamery in Walton. In the next few weeks, I will add some posts about some of the batches I did and some updates on the creamery.
Apart from making cheese, I have moved my cave. I lost the cave under the Brooklyn sidewalk because the lease to the building it came with, expired. Luckily my wife and I had just bought a house in Brooklyn with plenty of space. So I have moved my cheese in there. I have converted a space under the basement stair into a cave. I have cleaned it, tiled the floor and white washed the walls and ceiling. Because the space isn't cool enough, I have installed a air conditioner run by a coolbot. This easily keeps it to the right temperature but because I did not insulate, the air conditioner is running 50 % of the time on cool mode. I might try to squirt some expansion foam into the walls or otherwise insulate the space.
To keep up the humidity, I have installed a vaporizer. I know, this kind of defeats the purpose of trying to keep the space cool as the vaporizer steams up the space. But when I have some more time on my hands, I will change this into a humidity sensor controlled mister system. As I have planned a system like this for my cave in the creamery, this would be a good opportunity to investigate its workings.







2 comments:

Culinary Pen said...

Glad to hear you found a new home for your cheeses! What are those flat little rounds of cheese on the top shelf? They look like a Swiss washed-rind cheese called Tuma I once tried.

Ailith Blesington said...

Hah, that's a lot of cheese right there! Insulating the new cave will really help you in the long run. There are a lot of insulation options and you have to pick the one that will work for you the most. What kind of floor tiling did you use for the cave?