Freezing Cheese

it might go a bit grainy, but should taste fine. I always keep some cheddar type cheese grated in the freezer, you can use it for cooking straight from frozen. Frozen cream goes a bit grainy but is fine for cooking - just no good for pouring.

Thanks, jj. It's just that I'm the only one who eats it and I eat it slowly enough for it to start going mouldy. It seems a shame fornit to go to waste so I wondered about freezing half of it. I suppose I could use it in cooking if it wasn't spreadable after defrosting.

I think I have frozen it with no deterioration. You can but experiment, Bags. When I buy cheddar, I grate it in bulk and freeze it for cooking - and prevent myself from eating it.

I also freeze leftover Stilton for Broccoli and Stilton soup. Philly? I'd say try it and see - if it doesn't work, you've only wasted half a tub.

Don't think I've tried freezing Philly. We used to bring a couple of kilos of parmigiano home from Italy and I would cut into smaller pieces and freeze them. It always kept very well - after all Samuel Pepys buried his in the garden during the Plague

Bags you can get those tiny tubs Philly! Any help?

Now I think of it, I make a kind of pate with philly and a can of tuna plus a little mayo. I know I have frozen that in the past and it was perfectly edible.

Sounds good. Can you use salmon instead? Recipe please!

Didn't know Pepys had parmigiana!

What's a recipe, Galen? I just sling a can of tuna in with about half a pack of philly and a desertspoon of mayo and mash it all up together. I also do this with packs of hot smoked salmon which I buy in Aldi or Lidl. Very good on toast for lunch or sandwiches on my 'volunteer' day.

Mmm, I might try that, anno.

celeb, thanks. I'll look out for the tiny tubs but I haven't seen them here yet.

Freeze mousetrap by all means but it's no way to treat good quality cheese.

Mousetrap?

I use chunks of Mars bar or peanut butter in my mouse traps.

I freeze all kinds of cheese, soft and hard. I regularly freeze Quark without and fat free fromage frais without any problems.

Try it and see. The worst that can happen is that it is unusable when you defrost it and you have to throw it away

I freeze Quark, not Quark without!!

Proper cheese from a proper cheesemaker – the expensive sort you put on a cheeseboard to savour at the end of a meal or serve as part of a ploughman's lunch needs to be handled carefully and freezing isn't handling it carefully. It spoils both flavour and texture – indeed, some cheeses can be ruined when chilled to the temperature they must be stored at in shops by law in this country of ignorant lawmakers!

Bags Why don't you simply buy a smaller quantity of cream cheese from the deli and then it wouldn't be left to go mouldy?

There's a simple answer to that – no decent deli. Rural Scotland is wonderful but cheese is not its strong point.

Apart from grating cheddar and shoving it in the freezer to use for cooking, I never keep cheese in the fridge. I love many cheeses, and one of my pet hates is to have 'cold' cheese. It ruins the flavour. If it's the really smelly type, then I put it in a plastic lock-down container until eaten. I buy it sparingly and then only enough to use in the next few days - or when it has ripened and matured.

My dd doesn't understand that the date a cheese is edible by, is well past it's Bbf date.Brie should be soft! Dolce latte should be practically running off the plate!

As celebgran says, all supermarkets sell the sets of 4 tiny tubs of Philly. I use the extra light version all the time, and they have a life of at least 2 months, so there would be no need to freeze. The GCs use them as a dip for breadsticks etc..

It's bad enough keeping cheese in a fridge, never mind freezing the stuff!

I now have a mental image of my mum, doing her turn as 'Mousie' as she called it, cutting the mouldy bits off cheese and eating the rest for her lunch... Those were the days of inedible cheese-cloth rind.

DF & DU, on a cycling holiday together in the 1930s, were deeply disconsolate when the landlord of the pub they stayed in had no Stilton, he had thrown it out that morning because it had maggots in it. By thier reckoning it only became edible once the maggots appeared.

All supermarkets up here don't sell the tiny tubs of Philly. There are quite a few other things they don't sell too. You southerners would probably be surprised.