Raw milk - sour cheese?

[Walrus]

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

[bansidhe]

Hi,

I am very new to cheese making also.  Nonetheless, I will give you what comes to mind.  Yes, too much culture can over acidify your milk thus cheese.  Raw milk has a bunch of cool bacteria in it already, so it is typically recommended to reduce culture by 20-40%.  That said, in my limited experience I have noticed that cheese will taste much more acidic when they are young.  This dissipates overtime as I believe during aging the pH can rise.    Check out this fun bit of information
https://www.cheesescience.org/ph.html

[Lancer99]

I don't know why your cheese is sour. PH testing papers are completely useless, as are those pH meters that cost around $20.  You can get a good pH meter for around $60 or more.  I use a NIST-traceable (so you know how accurately it was calibrated) Apera.

Granted, it's a PITA when you first calibrate your pH meter every time you make cheese, but then it becomes second nature and don't really think about it IME.

-L

[bansidhe]

Why are pH testing papers completely useless?

[Lancer99]

Because they are wildly inaccurate. If you want know what the pH of your cheese is,, you need a calibrated meter.

I'm not saying you can't make good cheese without a pH meter, just that if that's what you want to do, pH test strips won't get you there.

-L

[bansidhe]

I just got a pH meter!  I'll use it for the first time today.  :-)