Vacuum packed cheese

We get these questions fairly regularly: "We are going travelling, can we safely take a piece of vacuum packed cheese on holiday?" "Do you sell long life cheese?" "If we order vacuum packed cheese, can we take that cheese on the plane as well?"

Our vacuum packaging

For some answers, let us first look at the vacuum packaging. All cheese leaves Kaasdok.nl in airtight packaging. Not only is there thick plastic packaging around the cheese, but all the air has been drawn out of that packaging as well. That means no air can reach the cheese and it cannot dry out any further. What is more, and this matters just as much: no mould can grow on it. We are happy to leave this process to our professional vacuum machine, and it does the job very quickly.

Keeping vacuum packed cheese in the fridge

If the packaging stays neatly tight around the cheese after you receive it, you can certainly keep vacuum packed cheese in the fridge for two months. If you then take it out of the packaging, the piece of cheese will be just as fresh as when we cut it. By that we mean it looks and tastes just as fresh as when we sent it to you in a parcel.

Keeping vacuum packed cheese outside the fridge

But what if you cannot keep the vacuum packed cheese in the fridge for a while? Say you go on a summer holiday by car and you are on the road for several hours. Is the cheese still edible then?
If the cheese is sent on very warm days, or if you are travelling for a long time, the cheese looks a little different if you take it out of the packaging straight afterwards. The higher temperature makes the cheese melt just a very little. You can see it because there are small droplets on the cheese. The cheese also feels a good deal softer. This is called sweating cheese, which does not sound especially appetising. It is not as bad as it sounds, because it is a completely natural reaction of a fine product that has been exposed to somewhat higher temperatures. You can still eat that cheese perfectly well, so there is no need to worry about it. But for the taste we always advise cooling the cheese first. The cheese then sets again, as it were, and takes the moisture back into itself.

Taking cheese on holiday

So you can take vacuum packed cheese on holiday without any trouble, even if it is a long drive to your destination. You could even say it is long life cheese, although we change nothing about the ingredients to make it so. Packaging could get damaged by accident. Suppose you open the cheese parcel with a knife and accidentally make a tiny cut in a vacuum pack. That piece of cheese is then no longer vacuum packed, even though most of it is still in the plastic. In that case we advise eating that cheese first when you arrive.
Some countries outside the EU require you to carry cheese for your own use vacuum packed. In that case it is certainly important to leave the packaging intact. For details and the exact rules, it is wise to read the import rules for a specific country before taking cheese to family or friends abroad.