Most nonprofessional home cheese making recipes for brine bathed cheeses (such as Gouda) recommend using a saturated brine, which is what I have been doing.
To better understand this cheese making step,
I researched it and one recommendation is
not to use saturated ~26% brine (which is simpler for home cheese makers to build and maintain), but rather to use brines between 18-23% salt. This is because higher % salt brine increases the risk that moisture will be lost too rapidly from the surface of the cheese, which can result in a very dehydrated layer which may hinder or reduce the further uptake of salt into the body of the cheese and thereby stop the cheese from reaching it's correct % salt in cheese, depending on cheese type.
While I can't check this on my cheeses as I have no way of measuring % salt in the final cheese, it makes sense. So in future I will use a lower % brine for salting my brine bathed cheeses. To measure that lower % brine (as I reuse my brine) I bought an
analog hydrometer style Salometer.
Please agree/disagree, experiences, other recommendations?