Hi All,
I'm fairly new to cheese making, and after a fairly successful gouda and some fresh lactic cheeses, I'm trying to figured out how to make a mold ripened lactic. I've made 2 attempts so far. The first was ash coated and innoculated with PC (recipe from cheesemaking.com), and I ended up with slip skin. The taste was ok but somewhat bitter. On this second attempt, I tried a recipe from the forums here for chaource that uses only geo for the rind. These have been looking more promising, with good mold coverage and seemingly no slip skin. I cut into one yesterday after about 3 weeks aging and noticed: 1) There hasn't been much softening under the rind at all, just a very slight amount near the rind. 2) The flavor was not what I expected, and I'm not sure I would say it's good. It has an odd funkyness, but not really in a savory way, with maybe a medicinal or band-aid overtone.
So my question for all of you is, what should a cheese like this with a geo rind actually taste like? The strain I'm using is GC65, which is described by the manufacturer as having a delicate milk flavor - that is not how I would describe this. How much variation in flavor is there between geo strains? Or perhaps I aged them too cold (45-50F) and that stressed the geo or something and caused off flavors? Or maybe it's infected with something else, though it doesn't look like it. Or maybe it's supposed to taste like this? Any thoughts? Pictures below for reference.
