Stop storing cheese in plastic wrap or bags. Here’s how the pros do it

Cheese is one of life’s small pleasures, but letting a good block expire before eating it only brings pain. To keep cheese fresh longer, you may want to reconsider your storage practices. By storing it correctly, cheddar, gruyere and camembert stay fresh longer. Keeping your best blocks wrapped in plastic can cause their premature death.

For tips on properly storing cheese, I cornered an expert, John Montez, a certified cheese professional and the education coordinator for New York Murray’s Cheese.

“Cheese is a preserved product,” Montez says. “There are a lot of things that help preserve it. It has a lot of acid and salt in it, and a lot of water has been removed compared to milk. So it’s rare that you ever have to throw away a piece of cheese.” In other words, cheese is made to last; ergo, a worthwhile investment.

However, how you cut and store your cheese matters. Just make sure you treat it in such a way that its liveliness is retained for as long as possible. You don’t need a lot of fancy cheese gadgets to make cheese last for weeks or months – just some basic tools, supplies and knowledge.

With Montez’s help, here’s what you need to know about cheese to understand its aging potential, and how to best cut and store your luxury cheese so you never have to throw it away.

Cheese is a living thing

Certain cheeses, such as blue cheese, wear their mold more proudly than others, but it can be helpful to think of cheese as the controlled spoilage of milk, and know that mold is almost always involved anyway. The snow-white rind of brie and other cheeses with a floral rind is a… kind of fungusmuch like the mottled outer surface of a firmer cheese like Gruyere. But fear not! If you’ve ever used a probiotic, you inherently understand that not all microbes are bad.

Read more: There is a lot of fake Parmesan. Here’s how to tell

This is all to say that a little extra mold on your cheese shouldn’t keep you from sticking with it. “If you see it getting a little moldy, you can usually scrape that mold off and it’s not a problem,” Montez says. Due to the lack of water in cheese, food mold cannot penetrate as deeply as would be the case with many other food products. “Look for black mold or something like that,” he says, “but it’s rare for a piece of cheese to become unsafe to eat. It will become unpalatable to you long before it becomes unsafe.”

Cut the cheese to make it easier to pack

So keeping the cheese tasty is the real goal. How you store your cheese will have the biggest impact on its lifespan, but how, when and what you cut it with can also play a role in its continued success in taste and texture. Precise cuts that leave a flat surface make it easier to wrap the cheese in the most effective way, and keeping the cheese intact for as long as possible also increases its longevity.

“Minimizing the surface area (exposed to the air) prevents cheese from drying out or becoming moldy,” says Montez. “So, for example, if you’re going to prepare cheese in advance for a party, the longer you can leave it whole, the better,” or if you’re a regular meal prepper, resist the urge to cut up a whole piece of cheese. to make it easier to reach, and just cut as you go.

As for making clean cuts, “You can do just about any job you need to do with one chef’s knife,” says Montez. “When it comes to softer cheeses, a skeleton knife It’s good to have something that reduces the drag of the blade, or a wire-based blade cheese harp which is used in many cheese shops. Nowadays you can even find it cheese boards with built-in wire. These are really good for leaving as much of the rind intact as possible with floury rinds and other soft cheeses.”

Wrap your cheese, but don’t use plastic

One of the two main goals when packaging and storing cheese is to allow for some airflow so that your fancy cheese can still breathe. “The main idea here is that you don’t want to wrap it in plastic,” says Montez. “There are a lot of active microorganisms in cheese and you want to keep them alive by the time you eat it.”

If you’re wondering why the piece of pre-sliced ​​cheese you bought at the grocer or cheese shop is wrapped in plastic, presumably by cheese professionals, the answer is marketing. “It’s mainly for display purposes,” Montez says, because you’re not likely to buy something you can’t see. “There are cheese shops where they only wrap in paper, but that is rare. If you are a large store that carries a lot of product, it is not a problem if you know whether the cheese has been wrapped in plastic for a few days. But otherwise it can be bad are for the cheese.”

You can extend the life of your artisanal cheeses by repackaging them in paper after returning home. ‘Formaticum makes great cheese paper that’s specifically designed to keep the outside from drying out while still allowing the cheese to breathe,” says Montez. “If you don’t have cheese paper, it’s okay to wrap it in wax paper, parchment paper, butcher paper, or whatever. “

While it may take some practice to get the crispy folds of experienced cheesemongers, think of your cheese as a small gift (which of course it is) and wrap it as if you were using festive wrapping paper. “You want the paper to make contact with the piece of cheese,” says Montez, “so crease as you go and make sure all sides of the cheese contact the paper in an even, flat way.” If this seems at all intimidating, Formaticum also makes useful: cheese storage bags where origami-level folding is not required.

How and where to store cheese so that it lasts longer

“What you’re really trying to achieve when storing cheese is to keep the cold air from the refrigerator from blowing on it, because that makes it dry out faster,” says Montez. Packaged cheeses should be kept in a drawer in your drawer refrigeratorin a corner where the fan doesn’t quite reach, or even in a small container with a cracked lid to keep air circulation available.

Hard cheeses, or even softer cheeses that you plan to consume within a few days, do not necessarily need to be kept in the refrigerator. You can simply find something to cover them, such as a cheese domeor for the truly devoted, a cheese cave. According to Montez: “Parmigiano Reggiano You never have to see your refrigerator. You can keep it at room temperature almost indefinitely.”

For more, here how do you know which cheap wines are really good?And how much money you can save if you shop at Trader Joe’s instead of the grocery store.