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| 2 weeks, white yeast |
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| 5 weeks some blue and black molds, earlier yeast patted down. |
Pecora is a loooong aged raw sheep milks cheese. It is sold at 10 months as a more mild semi hard cheese and 18+ months as a sharp dry hard cheese. The younger wheels have a lactic tang to them and are pleasantly sheepy with some deeper/sweeter flavors developing. The older wheels have a butterscotch sweetness, with bold fruit flavors and some earthiness near the rind. I like taking real old dry Pecora and grating it on things.
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| 6 month, full developed mottled looking rind, blue grows on waxy feeling surface |
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| 10 month, the spotty wind tufts visible on right is Geo, It gets rubbed into the rind making it waxy |
The cheese is hooped in cheesecloth and the rind has random artisan looking grooves on it. It gets washed with brine for the first few months until the rind looks ready. From then on it will be brushed frequently to keep mite damage at a minimum, but the natural rind will continue to develop. I like to encourage the faint white greasy Geotrichum candidum that shows up on many naturally rinded cheeses after a few months aging. It is indigenous meaning not added to the milk but is already present in the environment airborne or in the milk itself. It is a fungus with mold and yeast like forms that is common worldwide. It could fall into the milk and express later but I imagine it is airborne in the aging cave and cannot colonize until a later phase in the succession of rind ecology.
The geo sticks to the rind better than the dusty blues so when you brush them the blue comes right off and some of the geo presses in. After 8-10 months you can mainly rub that geo in and it builds up a thick waxy feeling rind that seems to protect the cheese from cracking and drying out as well as inhibit anything else from growing.
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| 14 months, cheese is hard and dense, beautiful orange scarred milky veteran |
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| 2 years, rind is pitted from mites but under the thick cellar tasting layer is wonderful cheese |
