Most recipes you will find for making cheese are terrible. There is a good reason for this: making cheese is subtle. One very small difference will make a completely different cheese. Many famous home cheese makers have never eaten most of the cheeses for which they have recipes. They don't know what they are trying to make. On top of that, they don't understand what the recipe is for. They can't make that style of cheese and if you follow their recipes, neither will you. There is also a good quote by Linuxboy on this forum somewhere. It says something like, "You can't duplicate a cheese simply by following a recipe". The milk you have is different from the milk I have. The conditions on the day are slightly different. The rennet is slightly different. The health and amount of your starter culture is slightly different. If you follow my recipe *exactly*, you can't hope to make a cheese like mine. You can only make a similar cheese by *understanding* what your goals are and trying to hit those goals.
I can't tell you how to make cheese in a single post, but let me explain some of the complications. Your milk is different. It has a different amount of calcium in it. It has a different amount of protein in it. The milk has been treated differently, which will affect both the calcium level and the way the protein reacts. The milk is a different age, which affects all of those things. The cows were eating different food than the cows who gave my my milk. If you are using raw milk, then you have other bacteria in the milk that I don't have. Why is all of this important?
Mostly cheese making (on the day of the make) is about controlling the acidity of the milk/curd. The amount of calcium in the milk, the way it is bound up with the protein, how much calcium is in solution, etc, etc, affects the acidity. Milk has a buffering capacity. As you add acid to the milk the calcium phosphate in the milk will neutralise the acid. As you add more acid, more calcium phosphate will leave the protein bundles and be dissolved into the milk, again slowing down how fast the milk acidifies. The condition of the protein, how the milk was stored, etc, etc, etc affects the buffering capacity of the milk greatly.
This means that if you start with some milk, heat it exactly the same as me, add the exact same amount of culture, hold it at exactly the same temperature for exactly the same time, you will find that your milk will be more or less acidic than mine. This will affect the speed that the rennet works. It will affect the speed that the whey is expelled from the curds as well. So you will have to wait longer, or shorter times to set the curd. You will have to cut the curd to a different size. You will have to stir a different amount of time. If you do *exactly* the same thing as me, you will end up with a curd that is bigger/smaller, moister/drier than mine.
And what's worse, is that it will have a different acidity. This means that your curd will stick more together or less. Also, if your curds are more moist than mine, you will have more lactose in the curd. This will allow the starter culture to breed more. This will cause the curd to get acidic more quickly. This will cause the whey to drain faster, the curds not to knit as well, and the curds to get more brittle.
When you have finished pressing the cheese, we'll have *completely* different moisture levels, *completely* different acidity levels, *completely* different curd texture, *completely* different character from the starter culture. But it doesn't end there! If you have more moisture than me, and you add exactly the same amount of salt, then your starter culture may still struggle on, causing the cheese to get very acidic over time, creating a crumbly paste. Whey will drain inside the cheese and be locked into by the rind, giving you a crumbly, wet cheese. But if you have less moisture than me and add the same amount of salt, then you will inhibit the yeasts for longer, encouraging *completely* different molds to dominate the rind.
Similarly, as the cheese ages, the cells of the starter culture break down releasing enzymes. Different enzymes work better at different acidities, so depending on the acidity the proteins will break down producing *completely* different flavours!
I could go on at length, but you get the idea. The recipes that you see for cheese making that give you an ingredient list and a list of steps will *not* duplicate a cheese. Even tiny differences at the beginning of the make lead to massive differences in the cheese that you produce. Even if you follow the steps *exactly* you are sure to get a different cheese simply because your milk is different than mine. If you measure something a little bit differently, or heat the milk at a different rate, or miss the temperature, or you wait a bit too long in a step, then it will be a completely different cheese entirely.
What you need is to understand what your goals are, and how to measure your progress towards those goals. You need to understand your options and techniques to respond to the measurements that you make. Recipes are mostly useless. At best they give you an idea of what somebody else's goals were. However, like I said, most recipes you will find are written by people that had no goals and wouldn't understand the goals even if you gave them some. If you ever see the words "Check for a clean break and wait another 10 minutes if you don't get one", you can be pretty sure that the author doesn't know what they are looking for when they are "checking for a clean break". That's pretty harsh of me to say, but I think it's true.
Having said that, I'm still on the upward slope of learning! I know enough to criticise, but not enough to give you great advice. Just keep making cheese. Keep learning about what is happening and what you should be looking for at each step. Also make the same cheese over and over and over again. It usually takes me at least 5 tries before I'm happy with a style of cheese I'm making. Even if I get it right the first time, it's just luck and I don't know *why* it is right. Then I have to make some mistakes and see what happens.
