Question about holding a temperature

[Ty520]

Hello all,

fairly new to cheese making - a few fresh cheeses under my belt, and want to start prepping to have a go at an aged cheese (a hispanico)

The recipe calls for holding at a specific temperature during two different steps ( I believe at coagulation, and then again at cooking of the curds, if i recall correctly?)

as a basic home hobbyist, can any of you provide simple, practical tips,tricks or techniques to do this on a home stove top?

the only ways I can think of to achieve this would be to either incrementally, slowly slowly slowly ratchet up the heat, waiting between each time for the temperature to plateau - my concern with this method is going too slowly or too quickly; I know some recipes require both quick temperature rises, or slow rises during certain steps, and fear that this method would just require me to hover over the control knob and result in constant over-corrections up and down.

OR, option 2: hitting my target temp, then cutting heat and covering the vessel with a lid and heavy towel or blanket - the concern here would be if it would maintain temperature long enough?

[rsterne]

Use an outer pot, larger than the cheese pot, filled with water.... Usually the handles for the inner pot will suspend it inside the outer pot.... Place it on a burner, put thermometers in both pots, and you will quickly figure out how much hotter the outer water pot has to be to increase the temperature slowly during the cooking phase, and to maintain the temperature of the inner pot during the holding phases.... For holding, my outer pot needs to be 1*C above the inner, and to raise the temperature of the inner by 1*C every 5 minutes, it needs to be 5-6*C higher.... Using an outer water bath also increases the thermal mass, so everything cools slower, and it takes very little input from the burner to maintain the temperature you want....

We do 8-9 litre makes, so I use an 11 litre cheese pot, suspended inside a 16 litre water pot....

Bob

[mikekchar]

I've moved from the pot-in-pot method to a direct heat method (on an IH stove) and it seems to work just as well for me.  Keep in mind, though, that 5L is my max, so it may not be suitable for larger volumes (which will need more heat).  What I tend to do is raise the temp in 1 degree increments.  So I'll raise it 1 degree and then wait however long I need and then raise it another 1 degree.  I haven't noticed any appreciable difference doing this.