Greetings folks,
please pardon my question, if it was already answered, but I searched it and did not find my answers here.
I'm quite new to cheese making, I made only 10 batches of cheese from raw milk so far. I'm following Gavin Webber's recipes (it's a lot easier for me to see how the product should look like during cooking, pressing etc.) and I think I'm starting to have a repeating problem with sour aftertaste. I haven't adjusted cultures for raw milk and followed the recipe and cheese, which was given time to acidify (butterkässe and caerphilly) developed a bit sour aftertaste when I opened it after aging (13°C), but after a while in the fridge (4°C) the sourness slowly disappeared. Gouda, which wasn't given time to acidify, doesn't have a sour aftertaste.
Is it possible to have sour aftertaste from overwhelming the milk with cultures, or should I look for problem somewhere else? On the other hand, caerphilly and butterkässe should be a bit sour when I looked for taste description, do maybe I have no problem at all.
Unfortunatelly I don't have a pH meter to check the pH in the process. I was looking into it and it looks like a major pain in the ... with all the calibrating and inaccuracy. Do you have a recommendation for a pH meter that is accurate, reliable and doesn't cost a fortune? Allternatively I found quite accurate pH papers, but accuracy is only 0,2-0,3 pH.
I'm plannig to cut the cultures by 50% in next batch to see what happens - that I found in another topic.
Thanks for your advice,
Mikulas