Author Topic: Feta - Surface Mushy In Brine  (Read 1330 times)

Offline dukegus

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Feta - Surface Mushy In Brine
« on: June 28, 2012, 08:43:36 AM »
Let's start from the top.
I had 10 lt of raw 80/20 goat/sheep milk.

I pasteurized at 65 for a few minutes and then dropped down to 42C. It was 3am so I couldn't wait for the temp to drop down more.
I added about 100ml of yogurt(thermophilic? starter) and about 50ml of buttermilk (mesophilic? starter) and after a 40 min inoculation I added
quite a bit of artisan made rennet from sheep's stomachs. I didn't measure flocculation because I didn't know what it was then but I had an
amazing clean break which I had never seen in my life in less that 30min.

I cut the curds in 2-3cm chunks left to settle for 10 min and then throw everything in a very big cheese cloth(muslin?). I left at room temp(30C) overnight
to drain and at the morning I put in a mold and turned a couple of times the next day. I salted in with about 2% by curds weight salt(40 gr for 2 kg curds)
and after 1 more day I put the log of cheese in a water brine of 7% at 12C fridge.

Generally the cheese had quite a hydration because of the big chunks of curds but I could be wrong because I'm inexperienced.
After just a couple of days a mushy rind appeared in the cheese so I too out of brine and dried in the fridge for 1 day and then back in again.
It was very soft and mushy and you could rub it off with your finger. As I read in the fundamentals of cheese science, "Such an effect is responsible for the "soft-rind" defect and swelling in cheese, and it is attributed to "salting-in" (solubilization) of the cheese protein in dilute NaCl solutions."

So finally I bough 6kg of milk and kept the whey and made a 7% whey brine and hopefully 5 days in there now have made it ok again.
Thx for any feedback, I'll try to post some pics too if the problem is still there...