Freezing Smoked Cheese

Interesting question and I am interested in the answer as well. I do know that when I was younger, my dad would buy sliced cheese in bulk and freeze some of it. When it thawed it was definitely different, kind of dry. I do not remember, however, how it was sealed during the freeze and if freezer burn played a role in the results.

I always seem to smoke way more cheese than I can reasonably go through before it would start growing hair and chit. so I am always tossing some in the freezer.

The freezer changes the texture of the cheese a bit. Some more than others. It gets more "crumbly". Cheddars that would be sliceable before will now tend to "snap" halfway through slicing leaving a rough slice, and the slice can be crumbled apart. Grating a frozen cheddar is pointless, you will get crumbles. The flavor is pretty much identical, but the texture change is also noticeable while eating it.

For these reasons, I use frozen cheeses as ingredients in recipes as opposed to a "cheese and crackers" sort of thing. They melt fine as far as I can tell, and I have even made soups and sauces with frozen cheeses.

Cream cheese suffers terribly from freezing. It does not get "crumbly", but the texture is grainy instead of creamy. I do not freeze cream cheese any more because of this, but that is the only one I have frozen in the past, which I will no longer freeze after smoking.

Hope this helps. It will be different, but is still useful, you just have to have the right application in mind for the frozen stuff.

I buy large quantities of cheese that is shipped in and freeze most of it. I can't tell a big difference between what's fresh and what's frozen and then thawed.