Carter, I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for but hopefully this will fit the bill.
What I will post here is:
1. The PH reading according to the recipe at a given step in the process.
2. MY PH reading at that step and any adjustments I made to the recipe.
My first step was to test the PH of the milk. There was nothing about the PH of fresh milk in the recipe so I guess they just figured that every idiot knew what I did not.
My Fresh milk PH was 6.70
After 1 hour of ripening the recipe said my PH should have dropped by 0.05 points.
My PH reading at this point was 6.63 so I did go a little over.
The recipe did not say what the PH should be after cutting the curd but my reading was: 6.61
The recipe called for letting the curd rest for 15 minutes. Again, it did not give a PH reading after this rest period but my PH was 6.57 at this point.
The recipe now called for a slow cooking of the curd. My temperature up to this point had been 90 degrees and I was to now raise the temperature up to 102 degrees over 30 minutes.
After this initial cooking stage I was to hold the temp at 102 degrees for another 75 minutes or until the PH reached 6.2
On this step it took me closer to 45 minutes to get to 102 degrees and during this step I took several PH readings. Once I did reach 102 degrees my PH was 6.43 I did not note all of the readings I took at this stage, but I did notice that my PH was dropping too quickly.
I then raised the temperature of the curd to 104 degrees to retard the culture a bit. This worked like a charm and the PH drop slowed drastically.
I did have to change the recipe here a bit. I had such a fast drop at first that I hit my target PH of 6.2 at 65 minutes into the cook. At this point I drained the whey through a cheesecloth lined collander and tested the Ph again, this time it was 6.11.
I then went into the cheddaring phase of the recipe.
I did check PH a lot during this stage simply because I didn't want to miss any of my marks. I figured this was one of those steps that was critical to a good make so I didn't want to screw up.
So....
The recipe PH, after the cheddaring step should have been: 5.3 - 5.4. Supposedly it should take 2 hours to reach this Ph level.
Being young and quick (yeah right), I hit a Ph reading of 5.3 in 1 hour and 50 minutes, so I immediately began the milling step.
Unfortunately this was the last PH reading I took on this batch of cheese.
The recipe called for salting in three steps, taking 30 minutes total.
Just as I added the last of my salt, I realized that I hadn't aired up my portable air tank so I had to rush to the garage and get it filled up.
I then had to set up the press and the mold....load the curd and get it all under pressure.
The curd actually felt COLD by this time and I was afraid that there was no way these little 1 - 2 inch squares would ever knit together. Pressing was my main focus at this point, not taking more Ph readings. :-)
I will say one more thing here (and I'll post something else in the cheddar forum)....
The curds did knit together perfectly and the last time I flipped it (at 7:00 this morning) the wheel was looking great.
I'll post a pic under cheddared/milled once it's out of the press.
As you can see, I did have to alter the recipe at a couple of different points, but not by much. The kicker is that I ended the actual make of the cheese (before milling) at 5.3. Wayne recommended not going below 5.1 because this could make the cheese hard and crumbly.
I find it amazing that such a small amout could make such a great differnce so whose to say that an extra 10 minutes here or an extra 5 minutes there might not turn out the cheese you hoped to make.
That's why I've decided that a Ph meter is something that I'm really going to like having in the house.
Hope this is what you were looking for and sorry about getting so long winded (again).
Dave
