Hello mhorlick and welcome to this forum! Building on DD's and Tea's feedback:
Also congrats on your successful soft cheeses and hope things turn out well when you finally cut your cheddar.
Your style of press is probably very similar to others in this forum and yes depending on the size of your press and the weights you are applying it can get quite top heavy. I think DaggerDoggie has the record so far, with 150 lb! I went the otherway and bought a Cart to use as a
Cheese Cart & Press, bit OTT.
I like your using cement in a bucket, very inventive, just FYI for others:
- Specific Gravity of Fresh Water is 1, density is 1 kg/litre or 8.3 lb/US gallon
- Specific Gravity of Cement is ~3, density is ~3 kg/litre or ~25 lb/US gallon
- Specific Gravity of Iron is ~7.8, density is 7.8 kg/litre or ~65 lb/US gallon
So if you are concerned with being unstable with large amounts of water, a more dense material could help.
Substituting 2% or 1% or skim milk for whole milk is feasible, albeit as DD says, taste and quality suffer as you remove the fat. I would try stepping down one notch and seeing what happens, I expect skim milk could be troublesome although I've seen commercially made skim milk based cheese in stores, so it to is feasible.
On your molds or hoops, 1 Cdn gallon = 1.201 US gallon and I suspect Ricki's hoop says it's for US gallons. That said, I've pressed several 4" diameter cheeses and a pressed 2 US gallon cheese may fit, like you I don't think the curds will. From the pictures on this forum you can see that several of us buy white PVC pipe from th plumbing section of hardware stores. Here Home Depot has pre-cut 2 ft sections that you could cut to your choice of length and drill a bunch of holes and then make followers. Info on the 6" diameter ones I recently handmade
is posted here.
For your small baby pressed cheeses, you could use the same but smaller white PVC pipe, ie 3" or 2" diameter. I suggest also buying the next size down pipe as a spacer between the follower and your weights. Another idea is to make one tall 3" diameter cheese and then cut it into logs aftr pressing. Problem is if you use a cheesecloth liner, it will be very folded over by the top giving large fold lines on the side of the cheese, especially for such a small diameter one, so I think you are better off with several small hoops or going without the cheesecloth with a tall cheese, just keep holes small and start off with very light weights until you build up a filter cake otherwise it will just all be extruded out the holes.
Anyway, just my 2 cents, welcome again and we'd love some pictures or your first pressed cheese!