Our first urban Cheddar air dried in our oven (off of course!) for a week, flipping it twice a day. It formed a nice, fairly solid rind and started smelling like real cheese rather than yogurt!
It was ready to get waxed. We melted just under 5 pounds of wax in a purchased-for-this-particular-purpose pot and dipped the cheese in the red liquid. It surprisingly cooled really fast which made the process of turning and dipping the cheese in the wax multiple times reasonably quick.
Here’s a shot right after the first dip. Justin posted some other really cool photos!
Since then, we made Cheddar #2 and Gouda #1 is air drying right now. Man, we’re going to have a lot of cheese in a few months!
My arbitrary goal: make at least one aged cheese a month, so that 6-12 months from now, we’ve got awesome cheese every month!
I like that goal!