My first attempt at smoking…

Cheddar cheese in this case. It rolls ok, but it’s a pig to get lit 😀

Slightly more seriously, I bought just over a kilo of cheese earlier in the week. Given that this was going to be my first attempt I bought the cheapest I could find. A couple of varieties in fact — Tesco’s own brand extra mature and Pilgrim’s Choice mature. I’ve actually no idea what they taste like before smoking as for obvious reasons we buy pretty much all of our cheese from the local butcher 🙂

I cut half of the cheese into blocks of about 100g.

To see if it would make any difference, I put them on the top and middle shelves in the smoker.

First time around I opted to try the beech dust provided as part of the smoker kit by ProQ. I filled just the outside channels of the smoke generator spiral as I’ve read that the entire outside takes about four hours to burn and that would give me a bit of time in hand if there was any messing about. It’s not been the ideal day for smoking given the temperature (over 14°C here) and because it’s been quite breezy. The latter made the smoke generator a little awkward to get lit and whilst I had a little hole burnt away above the tea light I really wasn’t sure it was going to work.

After a sluggish start it did get going though, and seemed quite happy in the bottom of the smoker.

I checked about an hour and a half in, and whilst the burn hadn’t progressed as far around the spiral as I was expecting it was clearly working so I left it to get on for a little over three hours at which point I removed the smoke generator from the base of the smoker. It still hadn’t burnt as far as I expected.

I’m not sure why that should be at the moment. Perhaps my wood isn’t as dry as it could be, or perhaps the wind interfered with the burning process in some way.

Anyhow, once the smoke generator was out of the way I opened up the smoker and took out the cheese. It’s very clearly changed colour, turning a bright yellow.

I’ve now wrapped the cheese in paper and put it in the fridge. Tomorrow I’ll vacuum pack it and we’ll keep it in the fridge for at least three weeks before tasting it. At least, that’s the plan 🙂

Assuming we have acceptable weather tomorrow I’ve decided to smoke the remaining cheese with apple, firstly to see if we can tell the difference between the two, but also so we can compare it with the apple-smoked cheddar from the butcher.

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