Hi all

[psearle]

Hi

I've just recently registered after finding this site through Google and exploring some of the very detailed and helpful posts on it.  I'm retired and live in "Cannards Grave" in the southwest UK (named after the landlord of the local pub a few hundred years ago who was hanged for robbing and murdering his guests).  I keep a few rare breed Golden Guernsey goats and am currently milking two of them.  My wife and I make and sell goats' milk soap and make yoghurt and soft cheese for our own consumption.  I tried making hard cheeses a couple of years ago and have restarted this recently.  I bought a wine cooler a few weeks ago and this currently has a 1.5 kg blue cheese, three 1.5 kg Tommes, a small cheddar and some Gouda ageing in it.  We also have 3 pretty fair looking Camemberts ageing in another fridge.  My aim is to be able to consistently make a decent blue, Camemberts and a Cheddar or similar.

Peter

[Cheese Head]

Howdy Peter and welcome! Well that is quite a name for a place, and near a favourite city of mine Bath.

Congrats on your cheeses and happy to have you here, you can spend a lifetime digging through all the posts.

I have never been a farmer but have fun making milk into something completely different!

[Gürkan Yeniçeri]

Welcome to the forum Peter. Have fun with the cheese making.

[Boofer]

Welcome aboard, Peter.

Looking forward to hearing of your cheese adventures and hopefully seeing some photos if you have occasion to snap them.

-Boofer-

[psearle]

Many thanks for the welcomes.  I've put photos of some of my cheesemaking efforts below together with one of my milk supply (please remove this if you feel its inappropriate to the forum).

I have a question which relates to my milk supply and I hope that this is the right place to ask it.  Basically I hand milk my goats twice a day, filter the milk and chill it then later I pasteurise it by heating to 72C for 15 seconds then chilling rapidly.  We get around 3 litres and a bit am and 2 litres and a bit pm.  Most days we take what is needed for making yoghurt, general household use, sales for puppies etc and then bag and freeze any excess.  If I plan to make cheese I save the am and pm raw milk one day and add it to the am milk of the next day.  This lot (mormally 8 or 9 litres) gets pasteurised at 66C for 30 mins then added to 6 or 7 litres of defrosted milk from the freezer as the first stage of cheesemaking.  I add calcium chloride (1 tsp of 33%) to the milk to compensate for the pasteurisation (the milk is pasteurised because a couple of years back there was an outbreak of TB in goats in the UK and this wasn't spotted until a couple of goatkeepers contracted the disease from drinking their goats' raw milk).

I'm quite pleased with my cheeses so far but is there anything I could do to make them better given the supply restrictions that I  have?  Perhaps some recipes/cheeses are more tolerant of pasteurised/previously frozen milk than others?

Thanks

Peter

Pictures below of our second batch of Camembert, a wedge of Gouda and our first small blue cheese, our first 3 Tommes, our milk supply with this year's crop of kids.

[Vina]

wow! your cheeses look so good, I can even feel the taste
I'm absolute newbie at cheesemaking therefore no answers to your questions unfortunately.

[fied]

Hello, Peter. I'm at the other end of the country from you - Glasgow, which means I'm restricted to using shop-bought pasteurised milk. Given your conditions, perhaps you could experiment with different cultures for flavour and types of cheese.

Orchard Valley Dairy has a good supply of these www.orchard-dairy.co.uk

[psearle]

Hi Fied

Thanks for the tip.  The four retail suppliers I know in the UK are Ascott, Homestead, Goat Nutrition and Moorlands.  The problem with all of these is the very limited selection of cultures they have on offer as well as some of their prices.  I found the Orchard Valley site myself when trying to get more info on some OV100 I had bought from Ascott.  Orchard Valley certainly has a wide selection but when I first visited their site I looked at their "Domestic and Artisan" range and found that the minimum order quantities (10s and 20s) ruled them out for me.  I've just looked again and found many items that I'd like for sale as single sachets so will explore further!  In the meantime, I've just placed a trial order with "thecheesemaker.com" in the US as their prices, including postage to the UK, seem very good.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers

Peter

[fied]

Hi Peter,

Of the 4 you mention, Homestead and Goat Nutrition are pretty reliable as to dates of cultures/rennets, etc., but they are limited for choice, as you say. Orchard Valley can prove expensive in some cases; you have to pick and choose cultures to keep costs reasonable. Since coming to this forum, it looks as though cheesemaker.com might be fine for cultures' quantities and prices. From what I can work out, many of them will ship without ill effects and the cost of postage to the UK isn't that great. The site might work out best for prices for small-scale home producers in the UK.

Other than that, I often make a sludge of rinds or pates of bought cheeses I like and add those to the milk, or culture, or to use as a wash. It's not always reliable, though I've never had complete disasters this way - just some uneven results.