Joe's Cheddar

[coffee joe]

Time to start from the beginning as I look for possible flaws in my process.

I have been making "Joe's Cheddar" for some time. I have used a Mother culture purchased from Cheesmaking.com(item C1) and replicated this for about a year. We use Mason jars and sterilized  hand skimmed milk. The product is a very tasty yogurt that has a following of it's own. Often get conscripted into making 2-3 liters of yogurt, 1 cube per liter, same procedure 15-18 hours @ 21ºC.
The original mother culture is kept frozen as a separate line, meaning that I replicate a line for producing more mother culture and a line that is used in production of cheese. Replicating is done about once every 3 weeks. We make cheese on Monday and Thursday as this is the limit of my refer/cave for now.

Here is the recipe I have followed from the beginning having made only some standardizing modifications. We have been using floc X 3 for setting since I found this site
 
Starter: 1 ice cube/Imperial Gallon(5 Liters) Stir in the starter and leave the milk, covered in a warm place for 45 min- 1 hour so that it can acidify. Don’t leave it for much longer than this otherwise the cheese may be too dry and crumbly.
Rennet: 3Ml/ Imperial Gallon(5 Lt) Set the temperature, to 30/86ºF ºC. Mix the rennet with two teaspoonfuls of previously boiled and cooled water and then stir it in. Surface stir for 2 min. to stop the cream collecting at the top. Cover the container and then leave the milk to set at 30ºC/86ºF for 45 min.
Setting: (Coagulating): The curd is normally ready when it is firm to the touch, gives slightly and does not leave a milk stain on the back of the finger. Note that with vegetarian rennet, setting takes longer than with animal rennet. It also takes longer in a cooler environment.
Cutting the curd: This is where the curd is cut in order to release the liquid whey. Cut down into the curd, from top to bottom one way then cut it at right angles to form square columns. The curd is then loosened from around the walls of the pan. Unless a curd knife is available to make horizontal cuts, a palette knife can used to make diagonal cuts to break up the curd into pieces that are approximately pea-sized. Stir gently with the hand for a couple of minutes.
Scalding: Sometimes referred to as cooking, this is where the temperature of the curds and whey is raised slowly while occasional stirring of the curds takes place by hand. Gradually increase the temperature to 38ºC/100ºF over the next 30-40 minutes. (1ºC/5 Min)
Pitching: This is the process of giving the whey a final, circular stir so that it whirls round. The curds then gradually sink to the bottom and collect at a central point. Turn off the heat and leave the pan (20 Min) until all movement has ceased in the liquid.
Running the whey: Ladle out as much of the liquid whey as possible, then place a previously sterilised cloth over a stainless steel bucket or large basin and tip in the curds. Make the cloth into a bundle by winding one corner around the other three. This is called a Stilton knot. Place the bundle on a tray which is tilted at an angle to let the whey drain away. Turn the bundle over to drain evenly for about 15 minutes.
Stacking or cheddaring (Texturing):Untie the bundle and the curds will be seen to have formed into a mass. Cut this into four-six slices and place one on top of the other then cover with the cloth. Every fifteen minutes place the outer slices of the curd on the inside of the stack, and vice versa. Repeat this process eight times( 2 hours total) until the curd resembles the texture of cooked breast of chicken when it is broken open.
Milling: This is the process of cutting the curd into pea-sized pieces. Traditionally a curd mill was used for this, but it is easy to do it by hand.
Salting: Sprinkle  salt (22g /10 liters of milk used) onto the milled curds. rolling them gently without breaking them further.
Moulding: This is the process of lining the cheese mould from the press with previously boiled cheesecloth and adding the curd until the mould is full. The corner of the cloth is then folded over the top of the cheese and it is ready for pressing.
Pressing: Once in the mould the curds have a wooden ‘follower’ placed on top so that when the mould is put into the press there is a surface on which to exert an even pressure.
Pressing cheese is essentially a process of compacting, the curds while extracting the liquid whey. For the first 20 min, apply a light pressure so that the fats are not lost with the whey then increase it to the maximum and leave until the following day.
Next day, remove the cheese from the press, replace the cloth with a clean one and put the cheese back in the mould, upside down, and press for another 24 hours.
Drying: Remove the cheese from the press and cloth and dip it in hot water (66ºC/150ºF) for one minute in order to consolidate and smooth the surface. Place it in a protected area at a temperature of 18-21ºC/65º-70ºF and leave it to dry for a day or two until a rind begins to form.
Sealing: Once the rind has formed the cheese can be sealed to prevent it becoming unduly desiccated while it is maturing. Large cheeses are sometimes bandaged but it is much easier to use cheese wax that is available from specialist suppliers.
Using a water bath, heat the wax in a pan and stir it to ensure that it is melting evenly.
Do not leave the pan unattended in case of fire! Dip the cheese into the liquid wax and coat thoroughly. It sets quickly, so rotate the cheese so that the area where your fingers are touching can also be coated. If preferred, you can paint on the wax with a paintbrush but this will probably need two coats.
Maturing: The last stage is often the all-important one. A cheese, which is tasteless and bland when freshly made, is full of flavour and body after its proper ripening period.
Leave to mature in a cool, dry place at 8 – 11ºC where it should be turned daily for the first three weeks, then on alternate days after that. For a large mild cheese, ripening should take place for at least three months. A longer period of ripening produces a more mature cheese. Smaller cheeses are usually ready after a month.

I am able to video any steps for those who willing to help improve the process,

[linuxboy]

That's a decent recipe, Joe. Katie Thear's, right? Looks like one of those british instructions. There are no obvious flaws, the instructions aren't exact enough for that. The small nuances in final texture and flavor outcome in cheddar have to do with managing exact acidity. It would be easier to spot any improvement ideas if we could correlate time it takes to reach acidity targets and acid levels at specific actions, most notably at rennetting, whey drain, and salting.

Beyond that, cheddar quality is all about the milk quality and the NSLAB naturally in the milk. If you want to tweak the make, you could use some lactobacillus adjuncts to bring out sweet, nutty, brothy, or hay notes.

[edit] Yep, the biggest improvement opportunity I see is to start using acidity-driven decisions, either TA or pH, instead of time-driven decisions. You could also standardize your starter a little more by using ml of starter instead of a cube.

[coffee joe]

After much help in other threads and many hours of lurking, I am now ready to start attempting to fine tune my process and fix some sticky issues that I can't seem to resolve. Consistency is not happening. For the last 6 months, I have been using a DORNIC ACIDIMETER for TA readings in Dº. Over the last 10 days, since I finally got an EXTECH pH110 that works, I will be better able to make fine adjustments.
Our milk is straight from the cow, piped in at 94ºF and 15.5 Dº, pH 6.65

First problem is Mother Culture
Due to our location in Brazil, DVI must pretty much be discarded as too expensive for daily use(I do have some for experimentation C101 from Cheesemaking.com). I have been using the C1 Mother Culture and replicating this for quite a while and we have made some very good cheddar. Once again, Consistency is not happening.
I have tried many different ways to produce my Mother Culture. I start with 1 quart of fresh whole milk, hand skim as much cream as possible off, then sterilize in a Ball Jar for 30 Minutes. I then let cool to around 74ºF, (Summertime temp of our cold water) when I put in the culture left over from the day before. Sailor posted that he thought I was using too much and asked what the pH was on the Mother Culture. Since I had been getting around 5.5Dº(0.55 TA) I thought I was doing OK. With the pH meter I am getting readings of 4.3 - I know this is too low, toxic for my meso, and I should be aiming at pH 4.8 +/-0.2. I have done everything I can think of, reduced the amount of inoculate to 3%, I followed Sailor's DVI/Mother Culture recipe and made a new Mother Culture from another of my scarce C1 packets. I have yet to be able to get under pH 5 without going straight to 4.4. This is in under 12 hours.
I figure that many of the other problems are related to this one, I hope to "Detective" my way through Mother Culture first

[linuxboy]

Joe, .55 TA is perfectly acceptable for a mother starter, assuming you're doing the titration right and reading the color correctly. The tricky thing with mother starters is do you hit .55 at the same point for each generation? Meaning does it take the same number of hours each time?  If you can achieve that consistency, you should be good to go.

[coffee joe]

Pav,

The .55 TA had me comfortable with the Mother Culture. However, now, with the ph meter well calibrated I get consistent readings of 4.3 - 4.4 pH after 12 hours. This is too low. The accuracy of titration is not the same as pH nor is there a linear conversion.
Also, when I was using frozen mother culture, I was getting more consistency in the pH drop throughout the make than now with fresh. This does not make sense unless the low pH has made the Mother culture less viable or in some other way damaged the culture.

[linuxboy]

Hmm, OK. What if you used a very small amount of the previous generation as the inoculant? Something like 1%?

When you say more consistency do you mean that with a fresh mother culture you're getting a slow vat? It's not dropping enough before drain? Or dropping too fast?

The other thing you could do is use Sailor's method and use a tiny amount of DVI for each batch of starter, to keep the colonies and ratios the same.

[coffee joe]

I keep playing with too many variables so here is what we did today.
Was/am measuring TA with Dornic solution N/9 in a 10ml sample with 5 drops 1% phenolphthalein. 
I start with milk at 15.5 Dº and 6.65 pH and 94ºF. I take about 15 Min to get the Temp down to 86ºF. At this point I add 1% culture and get a drop to 16 Dº; 6.55 pH in about 5 Min.
At this point I add the Rennet (Chymax Extra) did 5 Ml/30 liters today and still have a floc time of 9 min.(3X) Too short. Going to 4 Ml/30 liters tomorrow.
After the 27 min, we cut. Today the cut was fairy clean but not like when I was using more rennet and 6 min floc.
Should I let the pH drop more before adding Rennet? just keep cutting back the Rennet? Go to 1.5% Mother Culture? Our mother Culture is pH 4.3-4.4 consistent - Sailor says "I shoot for a pH of 4.2 to 4.5 for Meso" so maybe this is not the problem.

From this point on the Vat is very slow and we are having a hard time to get pH down. We raise temp 2ºF every 5 min, or 35 min to get from 86º to 100º. At this point pH was still 6.5. I cooked with slow stirring 100º for 50 min and got to pH 6.45, when I drained due to the fact the curds were getting tough. We used to have fast TA drop during cooking.
Proceeded through the rest of the make with cheddaring 2 hours getting down to pH 5.95 milling and salting did not drop any more.
First whey out of press pH 5.85

[linuxboy]

When working with a mother culture like this, it's a best practice to create an as-is plot of the acidification curve using only milk and various percentages of inoculations. This is after you have figured out your propagation strategy for creating successive generations of the starter.

meaning you get the mother process down to where you can reculture once a day. Using 1% and skim milk at 75F should just about get you there.

Then take that mother you made, and inoculate 3-4 separate batches of a small amount of milk.. say a liter. inoculate at 1, 1.5, 1.75, and 2%. And watch the acidity of each one and plot the acidity curves against time. This will give you a model for acidity development so you don't have to make vat after vat of cheese. And then you will see what amount to use of the starter, and can make cheese based on the theoretical projections.

[coffee joe]

Thank you for this simple test, should have thought of this myself.
Will do 10ml, 15ml, 20 ml and 25 ml per liter for acid curve measure at 10 min intervals.
If percentage of starter is the problem, great, this will let me know.
As to the starter itself, we do replicate every day Saturday Sunday even Christmas! Is a pH of 4.3 not going to create toxicity? If not, we are fine there. The 14 hour time frame for culturing is ideal for our 7AM to 5PM work day. Inoculate at 5PM and ready to work at 7AM. Air conditioned room kept at 75ºF-77º in a water bath. These constants are easy to maintain.
Since i got the same pH with replicated mother culture, DVI 101 from cheesemaking and new C1 from same source, what other factors could be affecting the propagation speed?

[linuxboy]

The way bacteria work is in 4 phases. I think I posted this somewhere here before. But it's:

- Lag phase
- Log phase
- Maintenance phase
- Death phase

This lag phase happens whenever bacteria enter into a new environment after being in a maintenance/death phase. The maintenance phase is the point where many bacteria are dormant, and growth/multiplication stops. And the death phase is when more bacteria are dying than are multiplying. When you take a frozen culture that was frozen at its peak, those bacteria will have a lag phase when they first start out. But, if the frozen culture is fresh and not frozen for a long time, they will hit the ground running and start eating and multiplying quickly. Fresh culture that has reached saturation and too low of a pH, on the other hand, will often be more sluggish waking up and will have a longer lag phase before it really cranks up the acid production.

So for your schedule, either refrigerate sooner than 12-14 hours, as soon as pH if 4.9 or so, or use less starter as the initial seed (try .75% or even .5%). If you refrigerate as soon as the pH is at 4.8-4.9, it will slow down the acid production, enough to where it should make a difference in the acidification, and to where it will be at 4.6 by the time you add it to the milk.

4.3 is not the end of the world, but it is not optimal. Typically, the way to correct for this is to refrigerate, use another strain of culture, or use a higher percentage of starter in the vat to make up for the lower pH.

As for the point of adding rennet, if the way your culture works is that it has a very slow acid buildup at first, you should consider letting the milk ripen for 15-30 minutes. But plot the acidification and see - it will make total sense once you see the pH plots over time because then you can superimpose your make over it and figure out how to get the time to match the pH.

[coffee joe]

Ok I get the last post.
since the milk is pretty constant at pH 6.65 fresh, I have been working with a target of pH 6.55 to add rennet - this happens quickly, <10 Min. I am also using Dº of >16.0 should I wait for more acid development?

Next problem is Floc time.
1 - How will, or not, the pH of ripening time before rennet affect floc?
2 - Should I just keep cutting rennet amount until I get to 13-15 min floc?
Down to 5Ml/30 liters today and got 9 min floc.

[linuxboy]

should I wait for more acid development?

Depends on the results of your test with the different amounts and milks. You have to coincide the target moisture level due to temp rise and stirring with the target pH. So if at 1% you reach target moisture in 60 minutes, but the pH is wrong, then you need to use more culture and/or to ripen longer and add rennet later. There's no fixed point for rennet addition, but it is somewhere between 6.4 and 6.5, usually. The bigger consideration is getting the drain pH (no lower than 6.0 by the time you pack into slabs) to match up with the moisture.

Floc happens faster with more acid buildup. about 10-12% faster per .1 acidity (not linear, am estimating. more drastic change from 6.6 to 6.5 than 6.3 to 6.2). I would cut rennet until I get at least a 10 min floc. You can target a longer floc, such as 13-14 mins, but it has to work with your milk. If your milk does not do well with that long of a floc, you can use a lower floc target.

9 min floc to me is still a little high.

[SANDQ]

Hi all, I too have a question concerning mother culture vs DVI, I have been making goats milk cheddar for a year using a Danisco M 4001/2 DVI culture. I use a recipe using TA values and have been on a cheesemaking course, so I am confident I am reading the colour correctly, my methods are correct. Finally I am producing a good, consistant standard of cheese. Like Joe living in Brazil, and myself living in Bulgaria, the use of DVI cultures is now not cost effective.
I am considering turning to mother cultures as the answer, but I too can see that there may be problems with consistency. As mother cultures are a new subject and product for me, can anyone help me from the outset to get my consistency levels correct using TA values before I  start inoculating batches of milk with it  thanks  Quentin