I'm going with RBF's recommendation. If I don't try, I'll never know. I'm using Caldwell's recipe. It's interesting that I can't really find any good information on traditional Caerphilly (Caerffili). The wikipedia page is embarrassingly wrong (24 hour brining and then sprinkled with rice flour to make it white???) There are a couple of Youtube videos, but it's hard to get much info.
Quick recipe:
- 4L milk
- 1/16 tsp MA 4001
- 1/4 tsp CaCl2
- 13 drops rennet (normal: 16 drops)
- salt 8-10g (2 applications of 1% weight of curds)
- Add culture at 27 C. Bring up to 30 C over 5 min.
- Ripen for 55 min.
- Add CaCl2. Stir and wait 5 min.
- Add Rennet. 30 min to flocc, cut at 60 (Target 22 min, 2x total time from flocc)
- Cut 1.3 cm cubes. Wait *15 min*
- Stir 15 min. Then over 15 min raise temp to 34 C. Rest 5 min and drain.
- Pile curds to the side of the pot. Maintain 34C and cheddar for 1 hour. Cut slab every 15 minutes and restack.
- Cut curds into 2 cm pieces and salt with 1% weight of salt
- Press lightly for 1.5 - 2 hours
- Rub with 1% weight of salt. Press to close rind over 12-24 hours
- Brine for ~20 minutes
It's a very interesting recipe, so when I looked at it again I suddenly wanted to try it properly :-)
Edit: OK. Doing this has won me over. Cheddaring is surprisingly fun. I was *really* surprised by the texture of the curds after cheddaring for only an hour -- and at a low temp (only 34 C -- 93 F). And, I didn't have to worry at all about closing the rind. After 30 minutes in the press at a moderate weight, it's almost closed already. I probably should have started at a lower weight, but I was being a bit paranoid. Assuming the end result works out well, I'm *definitely* going to do it again. Super fun.
Some possible mistakes on my part: Again, I cut the curds too big. I also cooked them for the length the recipe said, but they didn't look quite ready to me, even after I extended the cooking time a bit. I'm not sure what it's supposed to look like, so I just went with it. The curds were draining whey like crazy. I cut and stacked them and they compressed *really* well (even getting that layered look you are supposed to get). I think I could have cut them and stacked them one more time because at milling time, the weight was still 745g. I didn't know how much salt to mill in. Caldwell says 1% of the curd weight, but then says to use a teaspoon for a 8 litre batch. So I'm thinking 1% of the final weight. But as soon as I added the salt to the curds, it just gushed more whey and I'm pretty sure almost none of it made it into the curds. We'll see.
