Oil Cured Cheese

 

Oil Cured Cheese is vintage and simple oil preserving cheese method to keep your cheese safe to eat for months without refrigerator. Perfect for your charcuterie board.

 

This easy, ancient way of curing semi hard cheese becomes soft and full of flavours after oil cured for a month. You may also use hard cheese like Manchego or Zamorano or Iberico.

 

It has been a while since I started to prepare vintage recipes using lard (and duck fat and vintage ways of curing food to publish and they include Cured Egg Yolks and Oil Cured Cheese. Honestly, I don’t know how available are lard and duck fat at your place but I definitely suggest you look for them if you find my suggestions inviting.

 

As about cured food, you may be surprised to see simple, frugal, low budget ingredients somewhere in the corner of your supermarket and this is exactly what happened to me; besides, some of the ingredients are waiting in the fridge and you can easily turn them to a huge success at your next party. Well, not exactly at the next one since the process requires some time but not active time included. Sounds promising, right?

The process of curing lasts for eight weeks at least but is absolutely worth of every single day since, once finished, oil cured cheese makes an amazing treat once you serve it with olives, sausages, crackers, and wine for tapas. The longer you keep it in oil, sweeter it is.

Also, this is one of the cheese recipes that you may serve with Plum Vinegar from Scratch  amazingly to finish your feast.

How to make cured cheese in oil?

We used smoked, semi hard, 25 % fat quality cheese and laid it into a dish, cover completely with vegetable oil and leave in cold dark place to rest for 8 – 10 weeks.
Below, you can see the photo of the cheese immediately after I took it out from oil, before removing mold and fresh one, before curing in the back of the photo:

Needless to say, you may cure more than one round of cheese, lay them all on bottom of one large dish and cover with vegetable oil.
So here we have the basic recipe for one single cheese you see on the photos. You need one rounded shape, 200 grams cow semi hard milk cheese, and sunflower oil to cover the cheese while curing. The quantity of oil depends on your bowl: smaller the bowl, less oil you need to cover the cheese to cure. I skipped extra virgin olive oil since we use homemade one and it is really loaded with intense flavours. It may take over the sweetness of home made oil cured cheese once you take it out!