I was mad, but now I'm happy

[John@PC]

After a very nice success with a cheddar yesterday I thought I'd use my remaining 2 gal. of whole milk for a mozzerella.  I also used for the first time Andy's beautiful horizontal curd cutter.  The cutter worked great but the cheese looks like a miserable failure .  Used Caldwell's recipe for traditional mozz and all went well until after I cut the curd, stirred and waited for the pH to drop to 6.1 or so.  Well, it's 5 hrs. now and we're still at 6.7 (from an initial 6.8 indicating to me the culture was doornail dead.

I pulled out the packet of Thermo B (sold by Biena) and only then did I remember I had problems with this one before some months ago.   Unlike Chozit cultures Biena doesn't put expy. date, only code and lot numbers.  I remember emailing Biena back then seeing if I could get a date-made for this lot but never heard back.  I purchased these cultures from Dairy Connection less than 6 mo. ago and they've been in the freezer ever since.

I should have tossed what was left of the culture when the first problem arose so I only have myself to blame.   Being desprit I've thrown in some Thermo C just to see if I could anything going.  Anyone have any ideas with what I can do with curds that don't acidify?

[Schnecken Slayer]

You could make haloumi from it...

[John@PC]

Thanks Slayer and a thank you cheese for the suggestion.  A haloumi it will be (going out to the back yard now to see if I can find some mint ).

[Stinky]

Use less salt than some of the recipes because man was the one I made salty.

[John@PC]

Thanks Stinky.  Caldwell says 1/4 lb salt for a 1 gal. make  for Halloumi so I did back off a bit.  A lot of twists and turns on this that I'll post in a seperate thread but so far so good.  I've never made halloumi and find the recipe a bit confusing (both with Karlin's and Caldwell's books) but maybe that's because I'm not a Cypriot.

[awakephd]

Glad to hear the cutter worked well, but oh, what a bummer on the dead cultures. I am curious whether one could get any culture into the curds post formation ... kind of like sprinkling PR on curds for a blue cheese, maybe you could sprinkle culture on ... of course, what sort of cheese you would then wind up with is anyone's guess. May be a new invention ... ?

[qdog1955]

Add pickled hot peppers----press into a fresh cheese.
Qdog

[John@PC]

Thanks to Slayer's suggestion everything turned out great .  I've never eaten Haloumi so I don't have anything to compare the taste to but it is very good.  The curds were to0 old to meld so I had to do a light press to form before cutting into wedges (closest I could come to disks).  This morning I took a couple of wedges and fried one (that's the one in the picture) and microwaved the other.  The fried was good with the raspberry/jalapeno but too hard.  Had the microwaved one with maple syrup and it was soft and wonderful.  Personally I could do without the mint but it does make it interesting.

A few weeks ago I had purchased a bucket strainer to try.  This thing works great for a quick curd transfer.

[Schnecken Slayer]

That looks great John, a cheese for your salvaging. I love the squeakiness of this cheese when you bite into it.

Not all Halloumi has mint in it and it is interesting to see why it was traditionally added:

From Wiki:
Traditionally, the mint leaves were used as a preservative, this practice arising from the serendipitous discovery that halloumi kept better and was fresher and more flavoursome when wrapped with mint leaves