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REFRIGERATOR MOLD Awright, it's not _really_ a home repair question. But the refrigerator that came with the flat I bought last fall (see, there's the tie-in) seems to have a resident cheese mold. I've had refrigerators that had whatever microbug makes milk turn in the past, and cleaned them with bleach to kill it, but I never had a refrigerator in which cheese went bad this fast -- I can't keep even a good aged cheddar for more than about two weeks. Does anyone have any ideas about this? The bleach trick doesn't seem to have worked, though I may try it again. Does bleach kill molds? It matters a wee bit because I'm allergic to the penicillin family (it interferes with breathing), and on the antique advice that once you can see mold on a cheese, you have to figure there are threads of it all through, I keep having to throw the stuff out. Any advice? --Lauren I've done some work in a cheese factory lately (embedded DOS system in a scale to weigh the resultant cheese blocks needed packet driver and working NFS), and have gotten the whole shebang tour. When the trucks come in and dump their milk, they get rinsed out three times: once with an acid, once with a base, and once with chlorine. So far, nothing has figured out how to live through all three. So I guess the answer is: take no chances on finding/creating a mold that lives through bleach. Dead men tell no tales, and dead critters pass on no genes. --russ nelson Molds can sporulate and, once sporulated, survive a hellish chemical environment. The mold is probably growing in the refrigerator's insulation that has gotten wet with condensate. The cure is to take the refrigerator offline, do the bleach thing _everywhere_ on the fridge (take it outside to do this), and then let it sit and dry for a couple of weeks, repeat the bleach, and put the fridge back online Though, not having a fridge for a couple of weeks may cramp your style. Unless it's a really _good_ fridge, you may just prefer to toss it. Second possibility: you're buying crappy cheese, or not storing it right. If you keep the cheese _in_ _the_ _original_ _sealed_ _wrap_, does it still go bad so fast? Have you checked the temperature of the fridge with a good thermometer (check thermo calibration by immersing it in a bowl of water half-full of ice cubes. If it doesn't read 32F +- 1 degree, it's not a good thermometer. I find that running the fridge at 34F works well. --Crash
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