Unrefrigerated cheese how long

You may be familiar with the two-hour guideline for leaving perishable food out. Does that apply to unrefrigerated cheese and how long can cheese sit out? The answer is yes, but how long a particular cheese remains safe to eat depends on its moisture content and whether it is fresh or aged, among other factors. Cheesemaking has been around for thousands of years and was a way to preserve milk before refrigeration became available.

In fact, research has revealed most hard cheeses slow the growth of bacteria, so the chance of foodborne illness caused by cheese is extremely low. Refrigeration brings irreversible changes to the texture and even flavour of cheese, some more than the other, depending on the type of cheese.

Specialty cheese like boccocini or marscapone needs to be stored by refrigerating, but most other types of cheese, especially hard cheese, will retain their flavour better without any refrigeration. To store cheddar cheese without refrigeration, the cut surface of cheese needs to be wiped with white vinegar and then dried to remove all traces of vinegar. Next step is to wrap the cheese inside cheesecloth. However, special attention might be required, while soaking up the cheesecloth in white vinegar, making sure it is merely damp instead of wet.

Merely wrapping up the cheese in cheesecloth is not enough. Make sure you wrap at least two layers of paper and seal the whole unit shut using tape. But if you're preparing a cheese platter featuring expensive cheeses where the flavor, aroma and texture are crucial, it's important to let the cheese sit at room temperature for at least an hour before serving.

And as for how long you can leave it out, soft cheeses can stay out for 2 to 4 hours, while harder cheeses can stay out for up to 8 hours. Beyond that, the fat will start to leach out of the cheese, giving the surface a greasy appearance, and altering its texture.

Again, this assumes an ordinary room temperature of around 70 degrees. Some aficionados even claim that cheese shouldn't be refrigerated at all, which is not as outlandish as it sounds, assuming it's kept in a cool place, away from direct sunlight, and consumed within a day or two. For one thing, apart from keeping things cold, refrigerators are incredibly efficient at extracting moisture from the air.

Which means that if you store your cheese in the fridge, it's going to dry out, causing your cheese to lose quality more rapidly than if you kept it wrapped in parchment paper in a cool, dark cellar.

There are exceptions. Fresh, unripened cheeses like ricotta, cottage cheese and cream cheese need to be stored in the fridge. Apart from that, though, aged cheeses can stay out for hours, and up to a day, assuming your house is cool.

One way to look at it is that whatever you can't eat within a day should be kept in the fridge. This goes for soft, ripened cheeses like Brie, Camembert and other so-called "bloomy-rinded" cheeses, as well as semi-firm cheeses like Monterey Jack, cheddar and Swiss, and hard cheeses like Parmesan, Romano and pecorino. But since most people keep their homes warmer than 59 F, the fridge is the next best place.

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