My question would be within the same Cheddar. Let's say I encounter a recipe for an English Cheddar for 1 Gallon of milk. However I want to make a 5 Gallon wheel (or 10 or 20) of the very same English Cheddar, using that very same recipe.
Most people out there who write instructions for cheesemaking use "recipes", like you would find in a cookbook. Perhaps rightly so, it makes cheesemaking accessible. But it does not work well for scaling because teaspoon measurements and the like are inexact. In my make howtos, I always try to include the equivalent per hundredweight or liter, and also the bulk equivalent for culture, for easy conversion. Most commercial makes also do the same. For example, Peter Dixon also uses a similar notation. In general, you can ignore the recipe measurements that are meant for the home user and instead use the commercial notation (it's like baking recipes for home vs bakery baking recipes, same idea). To get to the commercial notation for any recipe, start with the premise that you should use 1% or 1.5% bulk equivalent for the culture (by volume), and 7-9 ml 200 IMCU (aka single strength) rennet per 100 lbs milk by weight.
In short, ignore recipes, and figure out the amount of rennet it takes to hit a specific time to floc target. Continental styles, like goudas and tommes have a time to floc of about 15 minutes. American styles have a time to floc of 10-12 minutes. And you adjust your rennet amounts through trial and error to hit those times, starting with about 8 ml/100 lbs milk.
Would lactation cycle enter into equation here?
Absolutely. It's not only total solids, but also the relative ratio of the solids. Winter milk usually has a lower PF, so the gel is weaker, so you use more rennet, cut to finer pieces, and cook a little hotter. The point of the rennet amount and floc is to hit a final moisture target in the curds, and therefore a final moisture target in the cheese. That's what all this is about.
Hmmmm, so is the goal to hit the time target or a pH target? Or are we hitting the time target because pH target is not available? Or is it something else?
The goal is to standardize milk and add rennet at the same milk pH every time, for consistency. Target pH is 6.5 for cow, 6.4 for goat, and 6.45 for sheep. This is for most hard cheeses. It's one reason I like bulk culture, you get the pH drop right away and can add rennet almost immediately. You have to balance your pH curve with your cook time and temp. Again, you balance these to get to a final moisture target in the curds.
Would a guideline table be possible with general percentage amounts per month, or at least season, or at whatever granularity the changes occur. I imagine each milk type would require its own table as well, but maybe it doesn't.
It's up to the cheesemaker. But in general, early lactation has moderate solids and is balanced in PF, mid lactation (aka summer milk) has more protein and less fat, and late lactation has lower PF. In your make you adjust this as I already said, cut smaller and heat higher for late milk, cut normal and heat normal for early milk, and cut normal, but heat lower for summer milk. This is why sticking your hand into the curd is so crucial for cheesemakers and why I keep saying pH is only part of it. You can get drain pH right, brine pH wrong, but hit the moisture target at whey drain, and your cheese will still be mostly the same.
Doh! Doh! and Double Doh! So the only alternative then is to post the question in the appropriate forum for the given wheel/block size?
Needless to say I would love to explore this further, if this has been covered somewhere by someone before, I'll take a link or a reference or a book identification.
Yes, Pat Fox and/or Paul McSweeney cover it in one of their works. I think maybe in Advanced Dairy Chemistry? One of the grad-level volumes. I'm sure their upcoming encyclopedia of cheese science will have this info as well if you want the latest summary of the research and science. Or ask me. Francois and I had a discussion a while ago on the role of fat in determining salt uptake.
