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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

I'm now kind of upset at myself that I have thrown out perfectly good Cheddar in the past due to white spots.

For firm & hard cheeses, the bad molds very rarely penetrate the surface. If you get some questionable looking mold on the outer surface, you can cut off the outer couple of mm and enjoy the remainder just fine. For rustic/home made cheeses, handling the "bad" mold on the outer surface is a normal part of the aging process before it makes it to the customer anyway. https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/learn/how-to-bandaging-chedda...

The USDA says to cut off at least an inch and be careful not to cut through mold: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

Also, if you get bright white(!) spots on cheese like Brie (which is made with white fungus), it's usually just the cheese "reactivating". You - theoretically - don't even need to cut off anything.

I’ve eaten brie weeks after sell by date. It just turns into a firmer cheese by then no striking difference in taste really.

Yeah, not much seems to happen to Brie - it stays fairly mild. Unlike Camembert, which gets significantly stronger and runnier over time.

It depends on the Brie - pasteurized or not, from Meaux/Melun/etc. I find Unpasteurized Brie de Melun to be very strong.

> It just turns into a firmer cheese by then

Really? I thought it was the other way around, starting relatively firm and liquefying as it rots.

Maybe by the end. It turned into more of a gouda texture; more effort to cut vs how soft brie starts off. Maybe it was drying out.

I remember having a brie-like cheese cut in half and left forgotten in the fridge for more than a month. The mold had reformed completely, as if it they were made like this in the first place.

It tasted fine, no one got sick. Kind of underwhelming to be honest, but it wasn't particularly tasty to begin with: industrial cheese, pasteurized milk. It fact, that it still had some life in it surprised me.

Fun! I've never let it come that far. Was it somehow fuzzy or really like the firm, white skin that it has when you buy it?

No, that is most likely mold. Not all white spots are positive, especially if they are on old cheese in the fridge (as per the article).

It does give a method of testing at home at the end, though, with hard being crystal and soft being mold.

Even if it is mold, just remove it off the surface. It doesn't penetrate far on hard cheeses like Gouda.

Also the reason why I don't buy pre-grated cheese, it doesn't age well. It also tends to be lower quality to begin with.

I actually did this yesterday to a block of cheese and now I regret it

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