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Taking three identical 1kg blocks of cheese to conduct an experiment on the effect of heat.

In the interests of consistent data, the two primary experimental blocks will be left unrefridgerated at all times, even though this is far from normal activity. One block will be the control, and is available to be eaten. (What was it BYS said? Hmm.) The control (block #1) will be treated as normal: it will spend part of its time under refridgeration and part not.

The other two blocks will be left out, and still sealed, until they are observed to be in the sought-after ripened state. At that point, one block (block #2) will be moved to the refridgerator, and the other (block #3) will be left out.

Blocks 2 and 3 will be kept wrapped, as would be the case in factory conditions.

Experiment started at 15:30 on 20091229.

20091230: Cheeses are observed to have partly transformed in the expected way. Will give them another day.

20091231: Blocks 2 and 3 have demonstrated the usual change in appearance, becoming darker in colour, softer, and releasing oil. Block 3 has a small puddle of oil inside the bag. Block 2 has been (16:30) transferred to refridgeration, and the final phase of the experiment begins.

20100101: Block 2 still has a little oil around it, but not as much as Block 3. #2 appears not to be significantly changing. #3 is extremely ripe.

20100102: The weather having been significantly cooler lately than it was on the first days of the experiment, all the transformations have slowed. #2 may be reversing its tranformation; will not be obvious till the packaging is opened. #3 is in much the same state as yesterday - if anything, a little firmer. No sign of mold, which is promising. It may well be that a sealed packet has no spores and is therefore 100% safe.

0103 -> 0108: Nothing visibly changing in either block. The weather has been stable at the lower temperature.


20100109: After a much warmer day, the experiment terminates with the opening of blocks 2 and 3.

Immediately obvious is that block #3 has some mold, which, due to its location behind the opaque part of the wrapper, was not visible to external observation. The mold is far from covering the entire surface, being in three distinct and small patches.

Block #2 was given a partial destructive test, and deemed edible.

Block #3 had its moldy outer layer removed, and the clean cheese underneath submitted to a similar test. Blind testing was unable to distinguish between slices taken from the top and bottom of the block. The smell of the mold was off-putting to some test subjects, but the cheese itself was deemed entirely edible. The pooled grease was removed from the bag and decanted to a skillet for further testing. The cheese was found to be difficult to slice, and had a tendency to crumble, suggesting that the loss of grease had a significantly detrimental effect.

Optimum may require warming the cheese to 30 deg for two days and then cooling it to somewhere between 4 deg and 20 deg - further research is required. The sample size in this experiment was far too small for accurate conclusions, but the results do show significant improvement against the control.