Standing in the middle of Standard Market/s new 1,200-square-foot cheese cave in Countryside, a suburb 20 miles southwest of Chicago, David Rogers looks worried. “You shouldn’t see that,” he says, frowning at the mist hissing from the cooling units on the ceiling. “I don’t know where that moisture is coming from. I’ll have to talk to the refrigeration company.”
Affinage, the art of aging cheese, is a separate concern from the making of the cheese, and is often done by different people. It’s a more common concept in Europe than in the U.S., though it’s become more popular on the east coast in the last ten years or so. Murray’s Cheese Shop built its now-iconic cheese caves underneath Bleeker Street in 2004, followed by several more New York City cheese stores, Jasper Hill Farms, and, in 2014, the east-coast supermarket chain Wegmans. Much like Standard Market, the stores buy cheese from creameries without the capital, time, or (in some cases) know-how to age their own cheeses.
A few wheels on the top shelf, which are nearly done aging, are already covered in mold. Those, Rogers says, are there to introduce specific molds to the room. “The Westmont store is where we started, and the ambient molds that were in that room started the whole process. It’s basically like the Westmont terroir, the natural molds that lived in that area.” He’s not looking to add the Countryside terroir to the mix, but to replicate, as closely as possible, what Standard Market has been doing in its original cheese cave. “We know what [those molds] do and how they work,” he says. “We’re shooting for the same flavor profile.” But molds and cheeses can be unpredictable, and it will be months before he’ll know the outcome. At Rogue Creamery in Oregon, Rogers says, it took the cheese makers a year to get things back in balance after they expanded their aging space. “Cheddar is a little easier [than blue cheese], but we are concerned.”
