Hi Reg.
I love these style of cheese, as do the rest of my family. So making them successfully would be a great thing for me. My first attempt was a simple Swiss, trying the recipe from Ricki's book. It was pretty much a flop, but I still have it in the cave. I got only a tiny 1.5 lb block. But it is barreling like you wouldn't believe.
The Gruyere recipe is from The Tim Smith book, Artisan Cheese.
There were only two changes I made. He was using 1/2 tsp propionic per gal while the instructions for these cheese on the package and in Ricki's book calls for 1/16 tsp per gal. Big difference. So I used 1 tsp for 3 gal.
The other thing I did was to skim 1.5 gal of the milk, because I don't know what the fat content of my Jersey milk is, but it's probably higher than store bought whole milk.
I didn't get to follow his pressing procedure because the curd was so firm and dry already. It's been in the cave at 55F for two days and it's already starting to barrel! I hope it doesn't crack on me.
When you say you let it ripen overnight, about how many hours is that? All the recipes I read call for ten minutes then add rennet. I suspect that is way too short. I know I get fantastic taste and yield from my cottage cheese and it goes for 24 hours and never needs rennet at all.
The starter I am using is this
thermophilic that I culture in pint jars. I am thinking about getting this
one.I am going to carefully read through all of your Alpine posts and then maybe I can ask you some intelligent questions.