Author Topic: Making chevre - pH INCREASES when adding culture, finally decreases but fails  (Read 1214 times)

sandhollerfarm

  • Guest
I've switched to the recipe found here on the site for chevre as the texture is far superior to anything else I've made. BUT, it fails about 25% of the time. This is how it happens:

I heat the milk (raw goat milk, 4 gallons at a time) to 75F and measure the pH. The milk is almost always 6.1-6.3. I then add a generic mesophilic culture (the packets you can get from New England Cheese Making). The recipe says to wait for a 0.2 DROP. This does happen sometimes, other times is increases to something around 6.6 before dropping again. If the increase happens, by the time it drops to 0.2 less than the original number, I add the rennet. When it hits 4.6, it is loose shreds that cannot be strained.

Any ideas on why its increasing or how I should handle it?

(We are getting our raw milk license and I'd like to work up to getting our cheese license. But I need to get better at certain cheeses!)

Offline Boofer

  • Old Cheese
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  • Location: Lakewood, Washington
  • Posts: 5,015
  • Cheeses: 344
  • Contemplating cheese
Marissa, how are are you testing pH? If it's with a meter, ensure the meter is clean with no milk stone, and calibrated. In the past I have had inexplicable rises in the pH while a make is in progress and they went away when I properly cleaned and calibrated my ExStik PH100 meter.

HTH.  :)

-Boofer-
Let's ferment something!
Bread, beer, wine, cheese...it's all good.

sandhollerfarm

  • Guest
Thanks Boofer. I'm using the pH meter from New England cheesemaking:

http://www.cheesemaking.com/PH-Meter_2.html

I cleaned per the directions and still saw a pH increase on the batch I did yesterday. I put the meter in a reference solution and it read correctly. Uhhh.....

By the way, I use the pH meter to make mozzarella all the time. It does the right thing and the cheese turns out fine. I'm so confused!

Thanks for the advice.