1Stilton is a creamy and crumbly British blue cheese whose roots date back to the early 1700s.
2It tastes mellower and less salty than many other varieties of blue cheese.
3Always produced in an 18 pound cylinder format,
4it has veins of blue mold radiating from the center outward.
5The production of stilton is strictly regulated.
6Only half a dozen dairies in the world located in three specific English counties are licensed to produce it
7and only from locally produced pasteurized milk.
8It takes 20 gallons of milk to make each 18-pound cylinder of stilton.
9They begin by pouring milk in a vat.
10Next, they add starter culture - laboratory-grown natural organisms.
11Then they mix a blue mold culture called Penicillium roqueforti with distilled water
12and add this to the milk as well.
13After about three hours, they stir in rennet - enzymes that coagulate the milk fat.
14After about 90 minutes, workers run a wire knife through the now gelatinous milk,
15separating the fat called curds from the liquid called whey.
16Then overnight, they drain the whey out of the bottom of the vat.
17The next morning, the firm curds go through a mill which breaks them up into a crumbly consistency.
18Workers weigh out portions of 24 pounds.
19Each of which will become an 18 pound cylinder of cheese.
20After adding salt (the company won't disclose just how much), two workers gently hand mix the portion.
21Two different mixing styles blending the ingredients more thoroughly than one.
22Then, they funnel each portion into a cylindrical plastic cheese mold called a hoop.
23The curds still contain whey, so workers stack the hoops for five days.
24Typically cheeses are pressed to drain the whey, not stilton.
25Here, gravity does the job.
26The cheese drains under its own weight.
27Workers flip the hoop once daily to drain through both the top and bottom.
28After five days, they remove the hoop.
29The cheese now dryer stands on its own.
30While with a knife, they perform a critical procedure called rubbing up.
31They rub the entire surface with a flat blade sealing all the holes
32so that air can't penetrate and cause premature internal mold growth.
33Now, the cheese goes onto a stillage, a type of trolley,
34and begins its journey through the climate-controlled blueing rooms
35named for the color of the internal mold growth which occurs there.
36Workers flip the cheese daily to prevent its cylindrical shape from distorting under its own weight.
37Within a week to 10 days, grayish white sometimes orange naturally occurring mold begins growing on the outside.
38And from that point on, when the cheese acquires a certain amount of mold,
39they move it to the next level room then to the next one and so on.
40At about the five week mark, they mount the cheese on the turntable of a piercing machine.
41With each press of a foot pedal, the turntable rotates slightly
42and long stainless steel needles pierce the cheese.
43These tiny holes permit oxygen to enter
44and kick start the Penicillium roqueforti blue mold culture that the dairy put in the milk earlier on.
45Before long, blue mold gradually grows from the center of the cheese outward.
46To monitor the extent of the blue mold growth,
47the dairies cheese graders draw samples using a tool called a cheese iron.
48The iron reaches all the way to the core of the cylinder.
49When the sample shows that the bluing runs right through, the cheese is ready, more or less.
50The timing's actually a bit tricky.
51Stilton is a relatively young cheese, best eaten between 12 and 14 weeks.
52The dairy does its best to coordinate shipping
53so that the cheese is at its optimum quality when it reaches the customer.
54Therefore, it ships eight or nine week old cheese to local stores
55and seven week old cheese to international customers
56so that the blue stilton will be an ideal eight or nine weeks of age when it arrives at its destination.