Can You Freeze Cathedral City Cheese?

3 minutes

Cathedral City is one of the most iconic cheese brands in UK supermarkets, often on offer. But, before you know it, you’ve got more cheese than you can eat. So, what do you do with it?

How to Freeze Cathedral City Cheese

Freezing Cathedral City Cheese isn’t too complex, but we’d recommend following our steps to ensure success.

1. Grate: Grating the cheese before freezing can help maintain the cheese’s overall quality. You can freeze it without grating, but the cheese will thaw a little crumblier than it originally was.
2. Bag Up: Transferring the cheese into a freezer bag with spare room allows you to ensure you don’t press the cheese together, forming a strange, clumpy mass in your freezer. Instead, freezing the cheese that has been well-spaced through the bag will lead to cheese that’s easier to get out of the bag when you thaw it.
3. Seal: Press out any excess air from above the cheese, and try not to remove air from between the pieces of cheese. The reason for this is that any air will reduce the flavour of the cheese by oxidizing it during freezing, but you still need a little air to ensure the cheese doesn’t clump in the freezer.
4. Freeze: Freeze the cheese in the centre of our freezer to ensure it’s as far as possible from any frost front that might form at the edge of your freezer. This will stop the individual pieces of cheese from getting freezer burn, diminishing their flavour and making them crumbly.

3 Tips for Freezing Cathedral City Cheese

Now you know how to freeze it, we’ve got our 3 top tips which we strongly recommend following when freezing Cathedral City Cheese to have the best results:

Allow Some Air
A freezer bag with a little air between the cheese is a great way to ensure the cheese doesn’t come together. This is important as it stops the cheese from clumping without removing a lot of flavour from the cheese itself.

Grate First
Grating the cheese before freezing can ensure that the cheese’s texture doesn’t get damaged during freezing. Freezing a whole block is possible, but the block of cheese will typically become quite crumbly when frozen, leading to a poor final cheese.

Toss in Cornflour
When cheese is grated and bagged in a factory, it’s tossed in a mixture of cornflour and potato starch to stop the cheese from sticking together in the bag. If you’d like to follow this example, using a few teaspoons of cornflour could work very well for you.

How Long Can You Freeze Cathedral City Cheese?

You can freeze Cathedral City Cheese for around 3 months before the cheese loses any level of quality.

To ensure you preserve the cheese well over those three months, we would recommend that you grate the cheese before freezing it.

How Do You Defrost Cathedral City Cheese?

The simplest and best way to thaw Cathedral City Cheese is to place it in the fridge overnight. Once there, it should thaw well, and then be stored at a safe temperature while stored.

If you’re going to be melting the cheese into a sauce or a similar liquid, you can use it straight from frozen – the cheese will rapidly thaw and then melt.

Can You Refreeze Cathedral City Cheese?

Yes, you can refreeze Cathedral City Cheese.

The only things that you cannot refreeze are items that pose a level of food safety concern, with regard to bacterial growth. Typically, these are meat, fish, and raw dairy.

Does Cathedral City Cheese Freeze Well?

Yes, it does! Typically, the flavour of Cathedral City Cheese freezes very well, though the texture can be damaged a little.

Typically the cheese becomes crumblier after freezing – this isn’t a terrible thing, of course, but it’s worth bearing in mind if you’re concerned about the quality of your cheese.

Related FAQs

If you’ve still got questions about freezing Cathedral City Cheese or cheese in general, then these may help: