Vacuum sealing after drying on counter -- questions?

[WrongWhey]

Hi all.

New cheese maker here. I've made a couple cheddars, a gouda, and pepperjack recently as my first few cheeses that need to be aged. What I did was to let the cheeses air dry on a mat, underneath a food net, with a ceiling fan blowing lightly above at around 70F.

They all took about 2 or 3 days until I felt like they were dry to the touch and a sort of rind was present in its young stage on each before proceeding. Then I vacuum sealed them and placed them in my mini-fridge cheese cave, which seems to keep a temp range of 55F plus or minus a couple degrees.

I also have the cave set up with salt and water cups to create humidity of around 70-75%.

Here are my questions if you can help me please:

1.) Is the humidity actually needed if I'm putting the cheeses into vacuum sealed bags? It seems like it wouldn't be able to have any effect but I'm just beginning to learn so I wanted to ask. My hunch is the humidity is only actually important when setting in non-sealed/waxed cheeses in the cave.

2.) Am I bagging up my cheeses too soon? I've been reading older posts on this forum today, and some of them have me wondering if I was supposed to let the cheeses sit naked in the cheese cave and then vacuum seal them after some time like that. Should I take my 6 wheels of cheese out of there bags? The oldest one went into the bag an the cave on 1-19 (white cheddar), 1-25 (yellow garlic jalapeno cheddar), 2-4 (gouda with fenugreek seeds), and the most recent today pepperjack). The gouda, I should mention, I did let sit for 4 days in the cave after the initial air drying, inside of a plastic aging box with a mat beneath it.

Any tips, pointers, and corrections of errors are welcome. Thank you!

[mikekchar]

1) Nope.  Just keep the temperature good and flip every day.  Flipping in important the distribute the salt properly.  After a month or so, it's not really necessary to do very often, but I think it's just easier to flip everything every day.

2) As long as it's finished draining and dry to the touch, you're done.  Last week I had an alpine style cheese get to dry in about 2 hours :-)  It depends a lot on how you drained/pressed the cheese, how dense it is, how much moisture is in the cheese.  What you don't want is to vacuum pack it and have it continue to leak whey into the bag because then you'll have to rebag it (though, it's not really the end of the world...).

[WrongWhey]

Thanks for the info! I would have started to lose sleep wondering haha

[WrongWhey]

1) Nope.  Just keep the temperature good and flip every day.  Flipping in important the distribute the salt properly.  After a month or so, it's not really necessary to do very often, but I think it's just easier to flip everything every day.

2) As long as it's finished draining and dry to the touch, you're done.  Last week I had an alpine style cheese get to dry in about 2 hours :-)  It depends a lot on how you drained/pressed the cheese, how dense it is, how much moisture is in the cheese.  What you don't want is to vacuum pack it and have it continue to leak whey into the bag because then you'll have to rebag it (though, it's not really the end of the world...).

I have a new, but basically the same question.

I'm making a Havarti Dill cheese today, using the NEC recipe:  https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/havarti-cheese-making-recipe.

In the Q&A section, vacuum sealing is discouraged due to this being a higher moisture cheese.

If I were to let the cheese dry to the touch on the counter first, and then vacuum seal, would that work for this cheese, or should I stick with aging it inside of a tupperware with a cheese mat in it, inside my cheese cave?

Hopefully as I make my way further into the Caldwell book I will start to be able to think these questions through myself. Thanks for your help!

[mikekchar]

Hopefully somebody else will know because I've never actually vacuum sealed a cheese.  It's kind of weird because Havarti is normally a rindless cheese, I think.  Gavin Webber vacuum packs some higher moisture cheeses and ends up with some whey in the bag.  He doesn't seem worried by it, but I don't know what the downsides are.  I suppose there is a chance of it refermenting.

[WrongWhey]

Thanks for the reply!

I did some digging in all the havarti related posts here and on the web, and it seems people have both adamantly said to wax/vacuum seal, and also to not wax/vacuum seal. Ha!

So, my plan is to let it dry to the touch. Age it for around a month in the cheese cave inside of a tupperware. Give it a brine wash anytime it looks like it might need it, and then try it at 5 weeks. If I don't devour the whole thing then, I'll vacuum seal it then.

The one reason I was thinking vacuum seal might help earlier on, is that this havarti seems much less stitched together than any of the other cheeses I've tried making so far, being the least pressed of the bunch. I though vacuum sealing might help with that, give it a sort of hug to help it mend better heheh

Here's what it looks like right now as it is drying. It seems to have not been pressed long enough due to all the craters (what do I call them?). I just followed the directions for the NEC recipe.

https://imgbox.com/xODqPMTQ

This cheese seems to have way more moisture than the pepperjack I did recently, and a bit more than the tomme style cheese too. The pepperjack I've vacuum sealed after maybe drying it out a tad overmuch, but it looks fine in the vacuum bag right now. The tomme style cheese is aging in tupperware in the cave and that is also doing fine. Hopefully that's an indication that either way will work out if I pay enough attention to it all.

Fingers crossed!

[B e n]

To me that doesn't look closed/knit well enough to age without sealing it one way or another. All those crevices are going to make it impossible to maintain a rind.

You could try closing it again, heat water to 160°f and immerse the cheese for 1-3 minutes, repress (if you already salted you may need to re-salt, but I am not real sure, I have only done this before salting when I notice a rind isn't closed).

If you don't want to risk that, vac bag it and keep an eye on it, if you start to see liquid around the cheese just pull it, dry it a little further and rebag. I have vac bagged a few cheeses that seemed moist and it worked out fine. You risk losing the cheese either way, but you won't learn how to solve the problem in the future if you try nothing

[WrongWhey]

To me that doesn't look closed/knit well enough to age without sealing it one way or another. All those crevices are going to make it impossible to maintain a rind.

This was my exact concern. So maybe it is best to give it a shot in the vacuum sealer. I've already salted it (brined for 4 hours), so I'll just do the vacuum seal once it's dry.

So in the future, if I'm following a recipe and the end result looks like this, I can just continue pressing and try to get it better knit instead of following the recipe blindly. Good to learn. Thanks for your input B e n.

[mikekchar]

After it's finished draining (about 2 hours), you can load as much weight on it as you need to close it.  You just want to stop pressing before it gets too acidic.  My general advice is to flip a lot while draining (my normal schedule is 15 min, 15 min, 30 min, 30 min, 30 min).  This gives you lots of opportunity to keep an eye on the rind to make sure it's closing the way you want.  I frequently still go too fast or too slow anyway though :-)

[WrongWhey]

After it's finished draining (about 2 hours), you can load as much weight on it as you need to close it.  You just want to stop pressing before it gets too acidic.  My general advice is to flip a lot while draining (my normal schedule is 15 min, 15 min, 30 min, 30 min, 30 min).  This gives you lots of opportunity to keep an eye on the rind to make sure it's closing the way you want.  I frequently still go too fast or too slow anyway though :-)

Thanks for the tips. I would have been too timid to add weight from what the recipe said. I guess the more situations I run into, the more intuitive the whole process will eventually become. I've just been trying to follow the recipes to the T, but it seems like I need to learn to improvise a bit here and there.

Well, I'll have a new chance to try it again this weekend. Probably not the same cheese though. Just in case this one works out I don't want to end up with double. I guess my dog would like that though haha.

[B e n]

I struggle with rind closure too. I am working under the assumption it's better to use more weight than the recipe calls for, than to end up with an open rind. I'm sure it has to do with the cold weather/kitchen, improper pH, and lack of experience. Sometimes I will have 2 small cheese from the same batch and one closes and one doesn't, it gets better every batch though. If I cannot get a rind to close I vac seal and hope for the best.

[WrongWhey]

I haven't delved into taking ph readings yet since I was trying to just follow the recipes. It's on my list of equipment to buy next.

Cold weather recently definitely may have interfered. I do most of my cheese-work in the kitchen, but lately I have had to keep the door propped open as it's maple tapping season, and I am boiling down sap in the kitchen half the time in the background.

I've vacuum sealed all of my cheese so far except the tomme style cheese. I haven't tried any of them yet but they all look ok in their bags. The good thing is I am using resealable vacuum seal bags, so if I do see whey in there, I can just take it out, dry everything and reseal it.

I looked in on the havarti this morning and it does seem to be filling in a bit as it dries, although many of the craters are still present. I'll be sealing it up after work today...

My tomme cheese was very similar, but maybe not as bad, but it also filled in a bit as it dried. Now that one is aging in a tupperware in the cave and it so far seems to be doing well. No mold growth, although I think for the tomme style one I am hoping for mold growth of some type to develop the rind.

Either I'm going to get fatter eating all my successes or my dog is going to get fatter eating all my mistakes. Too many mistakes and I might just join him tho lol

[mikekchar]

I struggle with rind closure too. I am working under the assumption it's better to use more weight than the recipe calls for, than to end up with an open rind.

It depends on what you are making.  If it's something with a cheddar process where you drain the curds completely and then try to press them, you need practically infinite weight.  If you are doing a more typical cheese where you are removing the curds from the vat and then putting them directly in the mold, then it means you are going too long in the vat and/or you are adding too much starter culture.  The timing for when to transfer into the vat is crucial.  I recommend making something like Jim Wallace's caciotta recipe: https://cheesemaking.com/products/caciotta-recipe  These will close with no weight if you get the culture and timing right.  Most recipes severely over press the cheeses IMHO, so if you are having trouble closing non-cheddars then you have a make problem, not a pressing problem.

I find that measuring culture from DVI cultures directly is impossible to do accurately/precisely.  The recipes don't help because they say "1/2 tsp" or similar which can easily be off by 50% depending on the batch you have gotten from the manufacturer.  I always make mother cultures now.  In this case you just take a thermophilic culture (with bulgaricus) and make yogurt out of it.  My nominal rate is 15 grams of yogurt per liter of milk, but this recipe is 12.5 grams because he want's *slightly* less culture.  The improvements in my cheese have been quite substantial since I started doing that.

The only downside is that for "farmhouse cultures", you can't easily make mother cultures.  They have both thermophilic and mesophilic cultures and you can't reasonably culture it in one go and get a good mix.  For those cases I usually create one mother culture at 42 C and another at room temperature and then mix them when I make the cheese.  Keep in mind that the room temperature one will take 12-16 hours while the 42 C one will take 6-8 hours, so you have to give yourself enough time.

[WrongWhey]

So I'm not sure if this is what you just described...but the last 2 cheeses I have worked on, a tomme style cheese, and this havarti, have both had the same issue with some cratering and the rind not closing as cleanly as it could.

In both attempts, the curd did not set in the time it was supposed to on the recipe. I previously had been using double strength rennet but recently purchased single strength since most of the recipes were calling for single strength and not double. Both times I had to let the curd finish setting, longer than the prescribed time each time by 30 minutes (I just reset the alarm to 30 minutes both times and hoped the curd would progress)--so, the curds were in the pot for roughly 30 minutes longer both times. Would that amount of time be enough to cause issue? Would the switch to the single strength rennet have anything to do with it? My previous cheeses using the double strength did not have this much of an issue (gouda, cheddar, pepper jack).

Also, yes I have been measuring the culture using a tsp. Thanks for detailing how to make mother cultures. I was actually wondering how to do this and had not yet come across whether it was possible or not. Glad to learn it is. How do you store all the cultures? I just now read mention of being able to freeze them as ice cubes in measured amounts. My cheese cave is just a tiny fridge at this point. I know I will eventually need to expand, but for now I'm stuck with this and probably don't have a ton of room to store cultures, but if the freeze method is something that works then possibly...

As always, thanks for the insights!

[B e n]

I find that measuring culture from DVI cultures directly is impossible to do accurately/precisely.  The recipes don't help because they say "1/2 tsp" or similar which can easily be off by 50% depending on the batch you have gotten from the manufacturer.  I always make mother cultures now.  In this case you just take a thermophilic culture (with bulgaricus) and make yogurt out of it.  My nominal rate is 15 grams of yogurt per liter of milk, but this recipe is 12.5 grams because he want's *slightly* less culture.  The improvements in my cheese have been quite substantial since I started doing that.

That makes sense, it is really hard to measure something like flora danica by volume with any precision. Something like "1/8 teaspoon" or a "skewer tip" gives an uncomfortable margin of error. Most of the hard cheese makes I have done use a farmhouse culture (and I have only a few cultures), I will start being more meticulous about measuring culture by weight (jewelers scale) and taking notes on the results, maybe that will get me further.

I did build a press yesterday with the hope of having a better chance at closing rinds, but I will focus more on the culture and see if I can't get some success.