November 6 Class: Day-by-Day Progress of Your Brie

Day 1 is the day we made the brie. We all took our basket of edible homework in a ziplock bag and hopefully remembered to drain the whey out periodically.  

45 minutes after filling the basket, we flipped the curds for the first time. 3 hours later we flipped again then left it at room temperature over night. 

The brie wheels were still in their baskets in the morning and I salted them on the top with a generous pinch of Kosher salt (any non-iodized salt will do). I left them for 45 minutes, still draining at room temperature then I flipped them and salted the other side. 

Then I left them draining in their forms at room temperature another four hours. For those of you who were not home during the dates, it's fine to leave them at room temp until you get home.

After the four hour waiting period I removed them from their forms and put them in their aging containers to start the ripening process.

The wine fridge and regular fridge bries both look the same at this point- they're both in a tupperware container with a lid that is not airtight, taking up less than 40% of the space in the container:

Yours might be in a container like this but with the lid NOT ON TIGHT.

You can really start to see the difference between the two aging methods more than a week later!

The wheel on the left was stored in the wine fridge around 52 degrees F and already has a fine layer of while mold fuzz.The wheel on the right was in the regular refrigerator and still looks fairly unchanged.