New cheese maker

[Lmmonroe]

Hello everyone, my husband and I are new to cheesemaking and are very grateful there is such a great Cheese Forum.  We just made Emmental yesterday and are brining it now.  Our plan is to put it in a large tupperware container with a wet sponge in our office which stays at 55 degrees for the first week.  Do we leave the top off or partially on so some air can get in?  For the second step we plan to put it on a low heating pad (we don't keep our house at 70 degrees) for the next 2 weeks and then into the garage for the 45 degree 3 month period in a cooler, possibly with an ice pack.  Does this sound like a good plan?  Any ideas/opinions are greatly appreciated.

[broombank]

I want to encourage you as a new cheese maker. Make sure your container is considerably bigger than the cheese and take the lid off every day or two to allow some ventilation. make sure that condensation doesn't drop  onto the cheese as it is maturing. Emmentaler is a difficult one to start with. Getting the Propionic bacteria to make the holes is difficult - you need the cheese to swell up but not so much that it bursts! The heat pad might be too warm. See if you can measure the temperature of the part of the cheese on the pad. Once your two weeks has passed try to find a place that is around 50F 10C - slightly warmer is OK - colder will just means it takes longer. In my limited experience ( 1 year and 40 cheeses later) problems only develop when the temperature is 15C 60F or above. I had big problems this year as the summer temperatures were much higher than usual  - global warming I think - and I had to rescue two of the cheeses before they burst out of their wax. Getting exact temperatures is not crucial but staying within an acceptable range  is really important. In the end I bought a two zone wine fridge to get better control.

[Lmmonroe]

Thank you for your encouragement and advice!  Making Emmentaler intimadated me too but my husband really wanted to try.  We have made mozzarella and ricotta before but this is our first hard cheese.  It looks like it will be a learning curve, will try again when we get our cheese cave/fridge put together. 

[mathewjones]

Are you washing the Emmentaler? The first time I tried that with a Gruyere was a truly icky experience. I ended up with a slimy hunk of foot odor that was entirely unpalatable and ended up getting chucked in the bin. But after reading a TON of posts here, especially by Alpkäserei and Al Lewis, but lots of others too, my current Emmentaler is coming along great. I'm almost at the stage where I'll stop washing and move it from the warm 70˚F (top of wine fridge) back to the 55˚F cave (inside wine fridge) for the last 3-4 months. I didn't add any B. linens at all (you know, because of the Gruyere disaster), I just wash with a 1:1:1 mix of 18% brine : white vinegar : red wine. This has been controlling foreign mold very nicely, and it picked up B. linens all by itself, from the wine, from the air or from my hands.

Here are some useful links:
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,11069.0.html
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,14102.0.html

Good luck!