Cheese, Cheddar (Clothbound)

⭐ The same cheese as Cheese, Cheddar (Waxed) up to the moment it comes out of the press, and a different cheese by the time you eat it. Making both from one day’s milk is the single most instructive thing in this wing, and it costs you nothing but a second mould.

🔴 The bandage is an EVAPORATION decision, and that is the whole of it. A waxed cheddar keeps its water. A clothbound one loses it — steadily, for months — and the weight it loses is where the concentration of flavour comes from. A bandaged wheel should be measurably lighter after six months. If it isn’t, your cave is too humid and the cheese is not concentrating.

⭐ And the cloth does a second job people miss: it hosts a rind. Wax excludes surface flora entirely. A larded cloth invites moulds and mites onto the outside of the cheese, and the enzymes they produce work slowly inward. That is flavour you cannot get any other way — and it is also weekly work for a year.

⚠ This one asks more of you than anything else in the section except a two-year grating cheese, and it asks it every week rather than in one hard afternoon.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/4 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 to 3 Tbsp fine salt — 2-2.5% of the milled curd by weight
• Butter muslin or purpose-made cheesecloth bandage, cut to fit
• 2 to 3 Tbsp lard or vegetable shortening, for larding the cloth

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Bacon Grease

1. Make the cheese exactly as for Cheese, Cheddar (Waxed) — ripen, rennet, cut to 3/8 inch, cook to 100-102 F, drain, cheddar for 90 minutes to two hours until it tears in fibres, mill, salt the curd at 2-2.5%, and press hard in stages up to 40-50 PSI for 24 hours.
2. Air-dry 2-5 days, until the surface is dry and slightly leathery.
3. ⭐ Now bandage it. Cut cloth to cover the two faces with an overlap, plus a strip for the side. Warm the lard until it is soft but not hot, and rub it into the cheese surface, then into the cloth.
4. Apply the cloth and smooth it down hard, working out every air pocket with your fingers. ⚠ An air pocket under the bandage is where mould gets in and stays. Lard over the top of the cloth as well, so the fabric is saturated rather than just greased.
5. Age at 50-55 F / 10-13 C, around 85% RH. ⭐ Lower humidity than most of this section — you WANT this one to dry.
6. Turn it weekly. Brush it weekly. A dry brush over the whole surface, knocking back the mould growth without trying to eliminate it. You are managing a rind, not sterilising one.
7. ⭐ Weigh it monthly and write the number down. This is the one cheese in the collection where the scale is a real instrument: steady weight loss means it is concentrating as intended, and a flat line means your cave is too humid.
8. Age 6 to 18 months. Cut it and the paste should be dense, close and dry, with a rind zone just under the cloth that tastes noticeably different from the centre. That gradient is what the bandage bought you.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t ⭐ My family, and I make it — ⚠ but as with the waxed version, which finish I actually use and how long I go is not written down anywhere, so these are the standard figures rather than mine. This is not West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, which is a protected name with a defined method and area.

🔴 Cheddaring is not pressing To cheddar is a specific operation, and it happens after the whey is gone and before the cheese goes anywhere near a press.

You drain the vat, let the curd knit into a solid slab, cut that slab into blocks, and then stack and re-stack the blocks, turning them, for one to two hours while they sit in their own warmth. The pile’s weight squeezes whey out, the acid keeps developing, and the texture changes completely.

⭐ The texture is the instrument. At the start you have a mass of fused curd. By the end it tears into fibres and looks, unmistakably, like cooked chicken breast. When it does that you are done — not when the timer says so. The pH at that point should be around 5.2–5.4, and this is the single best place in the whole section to own a meter, because “chicken breast” is a real instrument and a slippery one.

Why lard, and why saturate the cloth The fat does two things: it glues the cloth to the cheese so there is no air gap, and it regulates the evaporation so the wheel dries steadily instead of case-hardening. A dry cloth loosely applied gives you the worst of both — mould underneath and a cheese that dries unevenly.

⚠ Mites, and making peace with them A clothbound cheese in a real cave will get cheese mites on the rind. They are part of traditional practice and their grazing contributes to the flavour, and they are also why the weekly brush exists. ⭐ Milbenkäse takes the same organism and makes it the entire point of the cheese, so this is a matter of degree rather than a binary. If the idea is intolerable, wax instead — that is a legitimate choice and not a lesser one.

⭐ Make both, on the same day One vat, two moulds, two finishes. You will learn more about what rind treatment actually does from that single comparison than from anything written, including this. It is the cheapest experiment in the whole section.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/hard-pressed-cheddar/ and /cheese/making/rind-treatment/ on the site.