Hi,
I just put my second Gouda into the cave (wine fridge). The first one surprised me and turned out so good....we'll see about this one.
I used linuxboy's recipe from wacheese.com, but only 8 litres of milk. 7 litres 3.25% non-homogenized and 1 litre of skim, all organic. The dairy is actually just down the road from my in-laws farm.
I managed to stay mostly accurate to the recipe, except my cutting the curds was very uneven, and I didn't do enough to break up the bigger curds while stirring. I could see the problem with this especially during the final stirring stage, where I had smaller curds wanting to mat together, at the same time as much bigger, softer curds. As many do I'm sure, I'm imagining how to cheaply and easily create something to cut my curds more evenly. but that's another post....
With my off the wall press, I pressed in my mold under warm whey for 10 min, then flipped and pressed under more weight for 1 hour, flipped and then 5 more hours. I cut a new cutting board follower for my mold that is much better than the stainless lid I was using before.
I guess because I had some mechanical holes inside my last cheese, I added more weight to the end of my press. Maybe too much? My press is 3:1 and I added a 20lb weight, 60 lbs more than last time! this might be around 7 psi if I've guessed the weight of the press arm correctly. I don't have a scale to check the pressing weight total.
Brined in a completely saturated brine for 6 hours, flipping once.
This cheese seemed to dry on the surface much faster than my last cheese. It also seemed to sag a bit, the sides bulged out slightly...
I let it dry 4 days(longer than I meant to...) and waxed.
I forgot to take a picture before wax! Here's one with wax...