Let me be very general and not go into deep science for a second. It's the longest post I ever wrote here but this debate has been going on in the forums for a while and my view is very particular about it.
I have seen too many cheesemakers lately that have been very "culture happy", dropping their entire culture library into the milk and perusing exotic cultures almost competitively before they master cutting curd or understanding the activity of these cultures. To me this is a grand departure from cheesemaking for the sake of great culinary art into the world of science or performing "bacterial gardening" on soil made of curd. Too often this doesn't result in better cheese and creates expectations, disappointment and confusion. It's a little like doing aerobatics in an aircraft before you learned to takeoff and land and surely before you learned to assess if the aircraft and rules of aerodynamics are capable of doing what you are asking it to do. Doesn't mean that you can't learn to fly for the sake of aerobatics, it just means you have to follow a structured path to get there, and you will be fine.
There is no doubt that a cheese or any cultured product for that matter contains a diversity of living organisms, acids and enzymes in some harmony or another. This is also why raw milk that is still rich with the variety of these makes better cheese. Cooking is no different. I remember once reading that there are over 250 different acids in carrot which are known to men and many that are yet to be isolated. The character however; the appearance, aroma, texture, flavor and stability are entirely dependent on the balance between all of these, not on the fact that they are all present.
When we introduce cultures to milk, the idea is to over-promote a particular character over another by super-propagating that type of bacteria, giving it a head start -thus controlling the end result. We can put different "leaders" for different stages of the cheesemaking - starter bacteria for example is not used in the same way and timing as rind bacteria so they seldom conflict. The problem begins when we put in too many "leaders" to be in charge of the same aspect of cheese at once. They each "lead" their own way and end up fighting each other. That could happen by stealing each others' nutrients (remember these are inoculated in far higher count than that naturally occurring in the milk) or fight each other as flavors in your mouth because there are only so many yeasty, citrucy, buttery, stinky chalky, sharp or nutty characteristics which human has sensory capacity to process at once and many of them just don't work together.
Cheesemaking has always been about promoting what you have. Acidifying milk of a particular breed of particular animal eating a particular feed in a particular region and doing so in particular conditions, circumstances and reasoning - will give you very particular cheese. Culture mixes are a recent invention that is meant to mimic these particular variables outside of their natural habitat, so you can make Beaufort without having milk from cows feeding on the Savoie vegetation that age on spruce planks infected with the local soil's cylindrocarpon. It allows you to make Roquefort without actually owning a natural stone cave in the French Aveyron area. It enables you to make Reblochon without being stuck in a limestone basement of a 15th century monastery for 6 weeks. The principles and techniques of cheesemaking however remain the same and cultures are used to augment what is basically a good cheese to begin with - not to replace the basic cheesemaking or affinage skill (or to land character to a depleted poor quality milk).
This isn't something I just made up. It's an industry best practice to first make up a basic good cheese by way of fabrication and affinage and only then to refine the results with slight bacterial modifications, one at a time. You will seldom see commercial artisanal cheesemakers pouring cultures galore into their milk. It makes it impossible to find out which culture did what and how it interacted with other cultures and phages. It's a bit like playing all of your favorite songs at once, really loud. Or, like painting a picture of the sky by loading up a blank canvas with all of the most vivid colors you can find in your color swatch. Surely you will draw the sky first, paint it blue next and then use and mix other pigments to perfect it and give it proportion, depth and aesthetic qualities.
That is not to say that some cheese have a rather complex array of inoculated cultures in them. However... if you must put 6 starter cultures, 2 types of yeasts, 2 types of geo, 2 types of B.Linen and 3 types of PC than either you are
1. Making a spectacular cheese that took you at least a year of trial and error to figure out how to balance and you started it with good technique and , very simple cultures that you added up on in trial and error
or
2. You are using all of the microbiological assets in your disposal to apply some type of flavor and character into milk that is so poor that in no way can it naturally yield any flavorful cheese (as large scale industrial cheesemakers do)
In Annie's case what I am saying is simply - first make an Epoisses. Then revisit the bacterial makeup of it to make it spectacular. Having a complex array of bacterium on a platform that isn't good enough *yet* is not going to save it but just serve to confuse the cheesemaker and the cheese. People have been making great Epoisses for hundreds of years before they could purchase DVI cultures. Annie is obviously experience enough with her other cheese to be able to master this one rather quickly.
(and I don't understand why would she need to increase the candida utilis, debaryomyces hansenii, staphylococcus xylosus count in her curd when her issue is with the paste and not the wash/rind? This by the way explains the strong redness of her wash and what seems to be lack of geo re-growth and with it possibly the reduced proteolytic activity on the paste, but we will never know the probe with certainty unless we try these cultures one by one in different batches rather than in a single cheese.)
Now don't get me wrong, of course it's okay that our urban hobbyist cheese relies on SOME cultures, it's even good, safe and traditional. let me just add that I love interesting cultures and use them to create fascinating cheeses, but I am no scientist and this isn't a lab. It's ARTisanal cheesemaking which in my view should produce delightful cheese with exciting flavor, texture aroma and presentation -without being overly dependent on myriad of exotic cultures. Then it could be easily refined by testing other cultural designs methodically until it's spectacular. Does that make sense?
