New startup, hobbyist - advice on what cultures to acquire?

[DiamondDaveMg]

I'm new to cheesemaking and still in the learning and equipment gathering process.  As I don't have a store that sells cheesemaking material and equipment nearby, I'll need to buy much of what I need online...and deal with the shipping costs.

As regards to starters and cultures and comparing different recipes...ugh...there are a lot of options and brand specific naming. Its not clear to me if I use a different thermophilic culture in a butterkase recipe than called for, if I'll end up with a slightly different tasting butterkase or a wildly different cheese

To minimize shipping costs I'd like to order a few cultures that I can use in different recipes - my first cheeses will be butterkase, Havarti Cotswold and a parmesan or asiago.  Is there a group of meso and thermophilic cultures I should get to use across those cheese types, or as a beginner should I simply follow the recipe to the Tee and purchase exactly what is called for?

[Mornduk]

Welcome!

You can find a chart cross-referencing cultures and cheeses you can make with them here.
Different recipes for the same cheese will call for different cultures. The only think you "must" have for the cheeses you listed is a thermophilic and a mesophilic culture (a high temperature and a low temperature acidifier).
I'd recommend just getting the generic meso and thermo packages your online store serves and play with them for a little while... you'll discover which additional stuff you need from the store during that time so you can then get a consolidated order with no items you'll never use or big things you missed.
If you're getting "real cultures" I'd go with ALP-D, or Flora Danica + (either ALP-D, Thermo B, MA4000). That'd cover non-fancy cheeses easily even if the flavor profile was not "right".
Again you can find different recipes asking for different cultures quite often. If your shipping is onerous I'd also look at manufacturer's instructions for that culture (often have even recipes for the cheeses) and use the quantities they recommend, authors usually pump up numbers to ensure safety so nobody's suing them over a recipe, and I've frequently seen 2x or 3x the manufacturer recommended quantities in a recipe. Similarly you could make mother cultures with your DVI and freeze them so you have a "neverending supply".

[rsterne]

I think you can get away with starting with a 5-pack of Mesophilic and the same of Thermophilic from New England Cheesemaking to get you rolling.... As you gain experience and want to experiment more, then branch out into some of the more specific cultures and blends.... JMO, and I've only been doing this for 6 months....

Bob

[Lancer99]

You can make excellent cheese with yogurt (thermophilic) or buttermilk (mesophilic), so as others have said, if you have one meso and one thermo culture, you're good to go.

Having said that, I've had great results with the MA4000 series and others from Biena.

Unless you are a professional cheesemaker and can duplicate your procedures exactly, I think the exact culture has less importance than other variables such as how you cook the curds and store the cheese.

And if you end up with something wildly different from what you expected, as long as it tastes good, that's a bonus!

-L

[DiamondDaveMg]

You can make excellent cheese with yogurt (thermiphilic) or buttermilk (mesophilic), so as others have said, if you have one meso and one thermo culture, you're good to go....

Hey Lancer99 - when you say yogurt and buttermilk, do you mean using the produces from the grocery store, or cheese making cultures specifically for yogurt and buttermilk?

[Mornduk]

You can make excellent cheese with yogurt (thermiphilic) or buttermilk (mesophilic), so as others have said, if you have one meso and one thermo culture, you're good to go....

Hey Lancer99 - when you say yogurt and buttermilk, do you mean using the produces from the grocery store, or cheese making cultures specifically for yogurt and buttermilk?

You can use the products from the grocery store, but should do a culture first to ensure they can acidify your milk in a timely way. You can find more info here, you'd follow that process basically substituting the DVI cultures with cultured buttermilk or yogurt from the store.

[Lancer99]

Well, I am going to disagree.  I've made many good cheeses with products straight from the grocery store, although now I use cultures.  Just make sure the yogurt says something like "Active Cultures" (and they usually list the bacteria).  Buttermilk I think always has active cultures. IME no need to follow a 12 step program.

-L

[Mornduk]

I agree. Just remembered some people having issues with pH not dropping timely, and being advised to culture it to ensure it was active and had enough concentration. Probably didn't use the right wording there and put a "should" instead of a "might"

[mikekchar]

Using "mother cultures" is probably the biggest improvement I've made in my cheese making.  However, by "mother culture" I mean making sure that I make up some yogurt the day before and using that yogurt at a rate of 15g per liter of milk.  It's just massively more precise and predictable for small cheeses than trying to measure DVI culture.  I make the "mother culture" from either DVI cultures (just a tiny amount -- it doesn't matter how much you use as long as you give the milk enough time to grow the culture), or I make it from new commercial yogurt.  DVI cultures are dramatically cheaper and more convenient to use, though.  You also know what you are getting.

One of the problems with using commercial yogurt is that they don't always tell you what's in it.  Also, often with thermophilic cultures, they are bacteria that you don't necessarily want to use in cheese making.  Finally, there are some bacteria that you probably want for certain cheeses (helveticus for instance) that you probably won't be able to find in commercial yogurt.  Having said that, I use my Bulgarian yogurt all of the time and I love it for cheese.  I will probably buy a Bulgarian yogurt DVI culture the next time I buy ingredients though, because it's just *so* much cheaper and convenient.

I've tried to maintain mother cultures several times: freezing yogurt cubes, maintaining yogurt in the fridge and reculturing, maintaining whey cultures...  But I've been met with limited success.  Freezing cubes of yogurt works, but I've found that some of the cultures are more susceptible to dying off than others.  So if you have a mix of cultures, then you get some things apparently dying off.  Maintaining cultures as yogurt seems to work as long as you do mesophilic and thermophilic separately, but the mesophilic yogurts tend to have problems at low pH and so LLD, for example, seems to slowly die off.  Whey cultures seem to die after only a few days.  A whey culture, that you make a mother culture from, and then make a cheese from, and then a whey culture, etc, etc seems to work *really* well, but you pretty much have to make cheese every 3 days :-).  So I've kind of resigned myself to using DVI cultures.  Since I work from home, I am thinking of trying to find a rhythm where I *could* make cheese every 3 days, though...  Not sure I can eat that much cheese...

Edit: For recommendations to buy - Flora Danica, and the Thermo B Starter Culture from Biena.  Be a bit careful if look at cheesemaking.com information, though, as the dosage amounts seem wrong for all of the Biena products.  1 Do for Biena is for 100 liters of milk.  But again, I highly recommend making a mother culture from it and using the mother culture for making the cheese -- dramatically better and easier.

[DiamondDaveMg]

Thanks all - I appreciate the input

[Lancer99]

Maybe more than you wanted!

Cheesemaking can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.  And you will probably have some failures, but mostly yummy successes  Have fun!

-L