My recommendation, do what your signature says.
Temperatures depend on your recipe. Look at the recipe you are using, and do what it says. For our Alpkäse, temperature targets are different.
That said, your temperatures are around what I would say is good.
What culture are you using? I assume you are using a powdered starter?
When we use our whey culture, it has been incubated overnight and when we put it into the milk it is warm and fully actve. This makes a difference.
For a powdered culture, you have to adjust. I can't tell you exactly what adjustment.
If you take your culture out of the refrigerator, you should be fine to add it to refrigerated milk. Then it will gradually get warmed up with the milk. If you do this, warm it up slow.
I would actually recommend you do something replicating the practice on the alp. Heat up half of your milk to maybe 100 degrees (precision here is not important). The culture is mixed with this first part. Then add the other half, and heat up to 90 degrees (or 91, or whatever number you want.) If you are not preserving a whey culture, you can fudge things a little bit. When passing on a culture, you have to do things exactly the same every time, or you risk changing the balance of your culture or causing it to do strange things. But since you are probably using an isolated single use culture, this is not a factor.
If you do the 2-part warmup, it helps the culture to wake up and get to work.
Add the rennet at the proper temperature.
Now here is where I disagree with the 'common wisdom'. Many people will say all of this jargon about floc times and what have you. What I learned is that rennet should be measured out in such an amount that the curd is set in as close to 30 minutes as you can manage. I suppose this is because a lot of cheesemakers do pre-coagulation ripening and shoot for specific coag. pH targets, but we don't (and we can get consistent results). We just have a different method of accomplishing the same goal.
Now I have wondered off topic. Let's get back to your questions.
1. Yes, I would say so.
2. Yes, sounds good. Only if your air is particularly cool then maybe add 2 degrees.
3. Yes.
4. Complicated. Stir for 30 minutes after the FIRST cut, then finish cutting.
5. Yes, correct. Only I will add one thing, during the first 10 minutes the temperature rise must be very slow. Even the thermo Swiss type cultures don't like it if they get hot too fast.
Now like I said up there somewhere, if you are using a powdered culture (or rather, if you are not passing on a whey culture) then you have a good deal of room for error. yes, error will yield slight differences in the finished cheese but there is an acceptable range that you should shoot to be in. The temps you have listed land you right in the middle of that range.
Since I preserve whey cultures, I have to be precise with all of my methods. The bacteria adapt to the process, and when you are all over the place then your bacteria can go off in unpredictable directions. Consistency for me means that the strains I want thrive and dominate. For you, constancy just means that you are doing a good job
You have a culture that is isolated and one-time use. I don't.
I am thinking I might put up a small-batch adaptation of the Alpkäse recipe. If I do, you can use that as a reference as the process is very close. Just keep in mind that temperature targets are different.
