When should testing of cheese get completed
I am curious to know how others in the cheese world are testing product. We are a cheese manufacture plant and we make blue cheese along with a few other similar veining cheese plus some block cheeses.
When will it be the correct time to test blue cheese: After draining, brining, after curing or after packaging?
We currently do not finish the process of blue cheese making, but we do start the process up to taking cheese out of brine and bulk packaging. After we package our cheese we ship it our for punching, curing, cutting and packaging. At our brining step, we pull a sample and test for coliform, e. coli, Y/M, Listeria and heterolactic.
We do at times get coliform counts which is probably due to sanitation issues of equipment or even employees, but after cheese sits it develops acids and will eventually kill all if not most coliform. So my question is it beneficial for me to even test this cheese after brining to get a final decision on whether I should dump this cheese for high coliform or should I just sit on it and just test it later, I'm just now sure how long I should sit on this cheese?
Keep in mind that while coliform testing is helpful for gauging the microbial load in your product, it is not correlated with the presence or absence of pathogens, further, recent evidence suggests that the standard rule of aging cheese 60 days as a lethality step does not hold up under experimental and real conditions for pathogens.