HELP!
I'm so frustrated and trying to work through what's going on with my milk. Recently I've tried to make a basic chevre as well as a couple tommes and a halloumi and each time the same thing has happened. Curd hasn't set properly but gone stringy and grainy in texture. The tomme I just went to make, the ph dropped real quick - too quick. I used a 3.5 floc rate and it was looking good but waited maybe 5min longer than intended, went to cut it and found curd had totally sunk to the bottom of whey and was a stringy mess (gritty texture, stringy and sour, pH in 4.2 range). I may have added too much culture this time but that doesn't explain the other similar results.
I thought perhaps the bacteria count in the milk was high - so pasteurised it last time, no difference. The halloumi didn't set - though seemed to produce a small amount of stringy quite sweet and tasty mass, much like mozza. The chevre the day before seemed to 'blow'? I drained it and the result tastes like chevre but has air holes and wrong texture. I wondered if sanitation wasn't right - so did a very thorough job on that. Now wondering if perhaps one of our goats has an infection that's introducing bacteria into the milk.. I've been milking one goat since March with no probs and recently started milking some of our others who've recently kidded. I've tasted their milk post-milking and it tastes great and they have no signs of harbouring infection.. They are in early lactation (so expect relatively high butterfat).
I'm using a variety of direct set cultures, not the same ones for the different cheeses. Also using CaCl and animal rennet.
Any ideas anyone??
