Why I eat old cheese (2020)

I’ve really enjoyed using sodium citrate lately as an emulsifying agent to make things like queso and Mac’n’cheese. Once you start using it you’ll never want to use velveeta (or its better tasting older sister restaurant variant Land O Lakes melt) again. The other day I was making mac with it and found some funky foot smelling chunks of “queso fresco” (Mexican crumble cheese) in the fridge and decided to include them in my regular cheddar/Gruyère mix. These had just started to take on a little too much extra moisture and had that characteristic “funky but not rotten” smell. My god, that extra funk took the Mac from “really good” to “divine”.

(Cheese that's grown mold in the fridge, not cheese that was intentionally aged a lot before sale)

The author is not wrong, but if the goal is food waste reduction one could start with buying less in the first place.

My grandfather always used to joke that he would put a block of fresh cheese behind the stove, and by the time he forgot it was there it would be ready.

My mum briefly worked as kitchen staff for Winston Churchill, and she tells the story that they had to wrap his stilton in a piece of greaseproof paper, hold it up and listen for weevils moving about - for only when it was at that stage would the great man eat it.

Gabriel Coulet just started selling a wonderful 24-months Roquefort. It's very soft and creamy, strong but not too pungent, and beige to light brown in colour (it really look like it's spoiled, but it isn't :) ). I'm pretty sure it all started with a forgotten wheel of cheese in the caves that they decided to try out anyway :D

Food poisoning is real, Rotten Cheese and Panner could cause severe food poisoning, Until unless you and me are experts in determining whether aged cheese is still edible, a single ER visit due to food poisoning can eat up all money saved in eating aged cheese.