I'll put this here since this experimental cheese was left untreated to see what happens in my "cave", and it turned out to be of this type. This is not my first cheese ever, so far I have made queso fresco, cream cheese and St. Marcellins in mason jars that all turned out pretty well. I have mentioned in a different thread that I am exploring the possibilities of David Asher's "kefir only" approach to see if it works for me.
I made three basic rennet curd cheeses, two of which washed with b.linens which are still ripening. The third one was left untreated apart from flipping. All have been stored in a fridge at ~8.5 °C in one of those Tupperware cheese containers that have a semi-permeable membrane.
Procedure for the 3 cheeses:
3 l of pasteurised non-homogenised Alpine full fat milk (3.6%).
Inoculaiion at 32° to 35°C for 1 hour with 3 (physical) tablespoons of homemade kefir that had been going for a couple of days so it was already firming up.
Standard dose of liquid calf rennet with a setting time of one hour.
Curd cut into roughly 2 cm cubes
Healing 15 minutes
Cooking ~30 minutes at 32° to 35°C with intermittent stirring
Curd ladled into Valencay moulds (the only ones I had available at that point) and drained for a day
Dry salted to ~4% (this was too much but resulted from confusion how to convert the "tablespoons" in the original recipe to grams. Asher actually mentioned 10 g per tbsp somewhere in the book but I forgot about that and found a source with a much higher ratio. [Dear cheese recipe designers, please always show all metric equivalents!])
Air drying at room temperature for another day, then off into the "cave".
I cut the untreated cheese today because it had started softening up. It had developed a Brie-de-Meaux-ish rind of geo and PC and a few spots of wild blue, mainly on the bottom side. Texture is creamy with the centre not yet fully mature but already good to eat, overall slightly softer than French brie. The taste is medium strong and very pleasant, it is a bit on the salty side but still acceptable. I'd call it a success.
It is good to see that with my low-tech setup I can indeed make decent cheese, maybe not designed to exact specifications, but tasty nonetheless. I also have a basement room that is failry cool in the winter, I have already used it to pre-mature some semi-lactic crottin style cheeses to get a geo coaating going quickly. Those will be cut next week.
