NEW YORK—In Hunters Point, Queens, in a building tucked among derelict warehouses and factories, remnants from the Long Island City neighborhood’s industrial past, hundreds of wheels of cheese are quietly coming of age.
They sit silent and still, but imperceptible to the human eye, they’re bustling with activity. Whole communities of living microbes—mold, bacteria, yeast—are busy at work on their surfaces. Human hands fuss over them, too, intervening to flip, brush, or wash them every few days. With time, the cheeses grow rich with flavor.
This is the ancient art of affinage, or cheese aging, and it’s happening here at Murray’s Cheese’s cheese caves, an expansion of their beloved Bleecker Street retail store in Manhattan. In its Cave Aged program, Murray’s imports high-quality cheeses from across the country and the world, and then sends them to their caves to ripen and mature to their full potential. Days, months, or even years later, they resurface onto Murray’s shop counters completely transformed.
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