I assume it's too late to get help now, so I'm going to proceed the best I can figure out, but want to ask what the best way to handle this situation would have been.
First of all, I've been a cheese maker for about... oh, 4 hours now, and I'm not very well versed in it. Just an experiment to pass the night away.
I'm making some half-assed combination of this cheddar (
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,8247.msg57821.html#msg57821) and the "farmhouse/cheddar" on this page (
http://seaualait.webs.com/cheesemaking.htm). The end result doesn't really matter, just playing around.
Anyway, I made a starter that is maybe legit, from store-bought buttermilk. Mixed it with store-bought pasteurized/homogenized whole milk (big city, sigh). Waited 3 hours, heated it to 91F, and mixed in a junket rennet tab that was dissolved in cold water. Stirred well for 40 seconds, and let it sit for 30 minutes.
At 30 minutes, the check-for-clean-break time, it was still perfectly liquid. I quickly searched this forum and found that junket tablets kinda suck, and some recommendations to go ahead and pitch another. I got another ready and poured it in. *DOH*. In the 5 minutes it took to do that, coagulation started. I didn't notice until I made a nice big spin around the pot with my sanitized spoon and it turned into scrambled eggs.
Now it's been another 30 minutes. It looks like nice, firm scrambled eggs floating in whey. I'm just going to pretend it didn't happen and continue, but would there have been any way to save that?