Whenever I make any sort of blue cheese, it always seems to grow white mold in addition to the blue mold. The cheese ends up being very soft and creamy on the inside, like a camembert. It is tasty, and not the worst problem to have, but I would like to be able to control the ripening process a little better and get some blue cheeses that aren’t so gooey.
At first I thought the problem was the cheeses I use to populate the cheese. Usually I just use flora Danica as the base culture and then crumble some store bought blue cheese in during draining. I have tried a few different blue cheeses to populate the blue mold, but the result is always the same.
My second thought was maybe some cross-contamination was happening, with some white mold bacteria from a batch of Camembert I made clinging to the draining basket or something, and that was passing along the white mold to the blue cheese. But at this point it has been a long time since I last made anything with white mold, and I have washed and sanitized my equipment many times, and the result is the same.
Does anyone have any suggestions?