Curds Spongey, Impossible To Press - Cheese Cloth Cleaning > Root Causes Discussion

[Sailor Con Queso]

"Immediately" would confirm my suspicions of a coliform. You got contamination in there somewhere, so I would treat this as an opportunity to evaluate your milking, cooling, transport procedures. It often helps to have someone observe to spot things that you might be doing.

[cheeseymama]

I've have a similar problem on and off over the years. We milk 4 cows and several goats everyday. All my cheeses are raw milk cheeses. I never have this problem in the winter time, only in summer, when it gets dry and dusty here in California. I think it my problem is yeast, at least in my case, the curd comes out spongy, full of small holes, pig food, in other words. I now have come to associate this curd problem with dust in the milk parlor. I milk with a milking machine, an old fashioned one with a bucket and milk claw. I clean  and sterilize it after each milking, and I used to think that was enough...but then I started getting these stuborn yeasts! Very frustrating. I tried bleaching everything, spraying down my humble milk parlor with bleach spray, scouring everything comming into contact with my milk, I used really hot water, soaps and sanitizers, that helped of course, but did not entirely eliminate the problem. After struggling with this problem off and on for a couple of years, I finally figured that airborn yeast must be contaminating my milk. I finnaly realized it must be traveling up into the teat cups of my machine on airborn "dust" particles, while my cleaned milking machine just sat there in between milkings...  so I started putting a big black plastic bag over the milking unit after cleaning it... and guess what... I've had no more problems with spongy curd (knock on wood) ever since I started doing that! Such a simple solution that really worked for me.

[Gürkan Yeniçeri]

Hi Annie, do you have red clover growing and flowering close to where you live? And do you open kitchen windows when you are making cheese?

The reason I am asking is; red flowers of clover has got the propionic acid producing bacteria and they may fly into your milk during the making.

Just a possibility.