What I'm trying to do is something like what takes place in a brewery - know something of the viable population count in the starter culture, so you know something of your pitching rate. And if I know more precisely the optima for a given cheese - if such a thing exists - then I could do a more rigorous approach than could be gotten from dialing up and down from, say, a starting point of 1% bulk equivalent, or, admittedly worse, a recipe using "1/4 tsp DVI."
Granted, without a hemacytometer, dye, and viability counts, etc., this isn't going to happen, hence my "precious" thing, so I grant I'm overcomplicating things.
That said, as I later indicated I was simply trying to create a spreadsheet that would convert a known recipe between units. In the example case, the recipe given was 2.5 DCU for 500 lbs. milk. This was on the basis of raw milk. It indicated to double the starter amount, if using pasteurized milk. Going by that recipe, what I ended up with via the spreadsheet pipeline was - what seemed to me as exceedingly high, I grant you - 2.25%, and 11.6 ounces primer for a 4 gallon batch.
I'm thrown, too, by the amount. But at this point, rather than going gaga by the excessive amount, I was hoping to find a way to easily convert between units - in this case, DCU, a figure I'm not accustomed to - and the useful prediction of bulk equivalent, and primer amounts. In other words, not so much "is 2.25% correct for a pasteurized tomme batch?", but "is 2.25% and 11.7 oz. an accurate representation of a recipe calling for 5 DCU/500 lbs milk."
Hope that states it more clearly. If it helps clear it up, attached is the simple spreadsheet I created, using the above recipe as a starting point (Sailor, it incorporates your tables, thanks).
On the other hand, as I said, it isn't my intent to "add to complication or confusion"; if this is merely a dead road, yielding nothing useful to others, I'm perfectly willing to simply try a tomme, using the 1% basis and corresponding ounces of primer culture.
