Hello All! First time cheese maker here seeking a little advice on what to do with all my expired Flora Danica (EXP 02/2013
).
A while back I was given a cheese kit that makes camembert, blue cheeses and the like but I never got round to trying it out as about the same time I moved city, bought a new house, ect. With all that was going on, the ingredients were promptly shoved to the back of the fridge/freezer, equipment left packed away in a box and completely forgotten about. Then just the other day I found myself with a free day. Thinking that if I gave camembert a go I might have something in time to enjoy over Christmas, I pulled everything out only to discover it was all past the use by dates
I was going to give up right there but then I thought for the price of 2L of milk why not give it try, everything is just going to go in the bin anyways right? So followed the instructions; added starter culture, rested 90mins, add rennet, left for 60mins then test for a clean break. At this point curds where definitely setting but not very solid so I decided to leave it for longer (ended up leaving it about 1hr more). Then proceeded to cut the curds and stir, curds seemed a little soft, like loose set jelly and broke apart despite my effort to gently stir it, but oh well - in the moulds they go.
Today is now day 2 of flipping, still early days I know, but things seemed to have going alright (cross fingers). I've browsed the internet a little and from what I can gather my soft curds are no doubt caused by either the expired rennet or starter culture so I made a trip to the local home brew store and managed to pick up some liquid rennet but no luck with the starter culture. My thoughts are, that if I've managed to make it this far in the cheese making process there must be something still viable in my culture, so perhaps it can be revived? Maybe by making a mother culture with it? After all I still have 5 packets of the stuff, good for 8L of milk each! Or should I cut my losses and start afresh?