I come from Leicestershire in the UK, the home of Stilton, so it's been one of my goals at cheese making to produce one of these.
My first attempt is looking like a small grumpy old man at the moment but may taste OK in a couple of weeks - hopefully.
For my second attempt I became fascinated by the Stichelton story (www.stichelton.co.uk (http://www.stichelton.co.uk)). This is a dairy in the UK that is making raw milk versions of Stilton commercially, and because they use raw milk they cannot call it Stilton.
They have a really great website and a cheese that I have never tasted but one day I have to as it looks awesome. They use very little culture to let the raw milks character come through, do a very slow acidification and mature it for a longer 4 months.
I've tried to bring together all of the knowledge I can find about Stichelton (and Stilton making in general) into my second attempt and I've just got it to the drying out / starting maturation stage. It's looking very promising so I've written up all my current make notes here for anyone who might be interested. I'll add to this as it matures but I'm not planning on piercing it and cracking it open for a few months yet so this will be a slow steady set of updates.
Waiting for this one is going to be difficult...
For those without PDF viewers...
beautiful notes!! and a lovely looking cheese. AC4U!
It is my understanding, it could be wrong, that Stilton was originally made from raw milk. Then the government made the creameries switch to pasteurized milk. When they again allowed raw milk they could not call the cheese Stilton because Stilton was now being made with pasteurized milk so they had to rename the raw milk version to Stichelton. If that is correct then the raw milk version IS the original Stilton. At any rate I'm currently making a small 4 pound (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,15080.0.html) one for a friend. One of my favorite cheeses. Yours looks great!
Yes, that's what I understood too.
And apparently (buried on the website somewhere I think), when they set up the Stichelton dairy, they had some help/advice from the people from one of the original dairies that used to make raw milk Stiltons.
It all seems to be a bit of a raw nerve for the owners of the Stilton name though, as it is now part of the PDO that only pasteurised milk is used to make a Stilton and only in the three counties in the centre of the UK - so I'm obviously making my own interpretation of this great cheese.
I wonder what I'll call it.
That's a nice looking Cheese Al! I hope mine is looking as good soon!
Thank you for the cheese Mermaid!
I just call mine good. LOL Here's (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10696.0.html) one I did in 2012. Six lovely pounds of Stiltonesque cheese. ;D
Wow!
I have cheese envy!
One day maybe I'll be able to pull something like that off ;D
Please have a belated cheese from me as that one will always be worthy!
I really like the look of yours. I need to find an 8 pound tall mold so I can make a large cheese with the correct proportions, like yours! ;D AC4U
10 days into the maturation and it's slow and steady!
I've been trying to follow the Stichelton website recommendations for the first two weeks to try and promote the ambient yeasts on the rind instead of the more aggressive blue. Shooting for a relative humidity close to 80-85%.
I'm happy that I can see some pink and whites developing slowly but the blues are trying hard to establish.
The smell change was interesting, first few days it was close to a strong old cheddar rind, then some blue notes appeared but now it's starting to smell very mellow with no particularly strong notes.
I'm going to keep this going for a couple more weeks to see what happens to the rind. I'm hoping to get the yellow, pink, whites, and browns of a good Stichelton with the bouncy soft rind consistency (hope that makes sense) from their video.
Quote from: Al Lewis on December 09, 2015, 10:58:22 PM
I really like the look of yours. I need to find an 8 pound tall mold so I can make a large cheese with the correct proportions, like yours! ;D AC4U
Al, mikey687's mold looks like a straight sided polycarbonate mold. His notes indicate that it is about 6 inches in diameter and 12 inches high. John at Perfect Cheese http://www.perfect-cheese.com/ (http://www.perfect-cheese.com/) could fix you up with one of these. Mikey used about 20 liters of raw milk (~5.5 gallons) and from the picture it looks like he filled his mold to about 9 inches with wet curd. I've got an eight inch high mold from John and the inside diameter is about 5.75 inches. It ought to be able to give me a Stilton with near perfect proportions. :)
Kern
Thanks for the info Kern! Mikey687 That looks incredible. If you check back on that 4 pound thread I posted I put my piercing routine in there. I would not pierce through the top if I had a cheese with the proportions of yours. Looks perfect! After watching the video of the machines that pierce Stiltons I found that they pierce at 30° up and down. They always stop short of center too. Anyway, I posted a link to the video on there if you'd be interested in watching it. From the looks of your cheese I'd say you have it all sussed though! :D
Thanks Al!
Also, thanks for the link to the video. I've probably watched it about 10 times already but only on the Stilton associations website and they have it at an incredibly small size, your copy is an actual useful size.
I've still got some time till I want to pierce it as I'd like to let it mature slowly for a couple of months to bring out the subtle flavors before activating the blue mould inside, but I'm going to follow your 30 degree suggestion from the sides - I'd not picked that up from the video.
I've taken a couple of pictures of my mini cave arrangement for this one: A big plastic box on it's side with a cheese cloth 4th wall instead of the lid, all kept in a cold storage room.
I'm finding this coupled with some tubs of super saturated Potassium Chloride Brine (85% RH sinks) are helping to keep the RH in a good place. I'd not thought about it before hand but the cheese cloth "wall" is probably doing a good job of enabling waste gases to slowly bleed out of the aging environment.
The cheesecloth wall will also help to contain the blue mold from spreading throughout the room. I often lightly wrap my blues in a single layer of cheesecloth in my cave to help keep the roqueforte to itself.
Hiya Mikey,
This Stichelton and your first Gorgonzola look absolutely fantastic! Great job!
Just a quick update as I'm about half way through the maturation of my Stichelton and about 10 days away from piercing.
Conditions inside the mini cave have been very stable although I was probably running it a bit on the cold side for a few weeks while I was finishing off some cams in the same room. Temperature is now back to where I want it and I've got some interesting white and brown appearing (mostly on the ends).
Smells great, nice and mellow, like it's just waiting for the main event.
It's lost a small amount of mass and volume during the maturation but it's currently looking like I'll get a final yield of 13.5%
NICE!!!! AC4U (http://www.z4-forum.com/forum/images/smilies/smilie_thumbsup.gif)
definitely looking edable :P waiting for the taste results :)
I dunno ... it's hard to draw any conclusions with such limited data to work with.
:) Just kidding -- quite an impressive data collection (and presentation) system at work there! AC4U.
Quote from: awakephd on February 10, 2016, 05:55:27 PM
I dunno ... it's hard to draw any conclusions with such limited data to work with.
:)
(Thanks for the cheeses!)
Beautiful cheese! AC4U!!
Great looking cheese! Looking forward to the tasting notes. In the meantime have a cheese on me. ;D
excellent!
So yesterday I pierced it!
I followed Al's guidance on a 30 degree angle (I use disposable bamboo skewers) and it now has lots of holes.
I tasted some of the paste that was being extruded from the holes as I was piercing and it was very smooth and creamy with a lovely taste. I can't wait to see what happens once the blue gets going!
The plan is to let this mature for a further full 7 weeks - vintage grade!
Quote from: mikey687 on February 23, 2016, 07:19:39 PM
a further full 7 weeks - vintage grade!
What a fantastic phrase, "vintage grade" but how on earth could you wait another 7 weeks!?!? AC4U 8)
Mikey, I'm inspired and excited by your use of Potassium Chloride as an RH sink in a mini cave...had a quick look in this forum and can find very little on that approach - other than using NaCl to test/calibrate your hygrometer. Have you been logging RH fluctuations?
A few minutes on-line turns up a lot of info about using salt sinks, but not specifically for cheese making: NaCl=75%; KCl =85%; KNO3=95%.
I expect to have difficulty buying the pot.nitrate...
Do the sinks have to be as large as you made yours?
Another cheese for the result and for the in depth descriptions Mikey :).
Your mini-cave shows a lot of thought and engineering knowledge. I'm surprised a cheesecloth "lid" would retain humidity that well but if so it definitely would help with the air exchange rate that's so important with blues. You're use of saturated salt moisture sinks is also unique to the forum I think as Wattlebloke says. I have used both NaCl and most recently a half pound of KCl as a sink for a mini-cave with my last Stilton but didn't post details. I left the lid on (a half-size polycarbonate food pan) and if I had seen your post I probably would have tried the cheesecloth! I am a believer in using saturated salt solutions for calibrating humidity sensors and they are effective in mini-cave environments; here is a link (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/salt-humidity-d_1887.html) with some good info. to "dial in" your target %RH.
And it's my experience that you do need a pretty large surface area of salt "mush". As far as I can tell though you can recycle as much as you need to.
More on RH sinks: A few days ago I set up two ripening boxes/mini caves in 3.5 litre food storage boxes (nearly a gallon), one with a slurry of NaCl, one with KCl, in both cases the slurry covers the bottom of the container in a thin layer. Surprisingly, both are maintaining an RH of round 85%: expected for the KCl, but not the NaCl. The lids are sealed tight, and it's amazing to see dry walls and lid: there is no build up of moisture inside, even though the cheeses are very young... I take the lids off daily for a few seconds, and fan in a bit of fresh air. Isn't science wonderful :)
I'll have to tweak this a bit when I make my first blue...
Looking perfect Mikey!! Can't wait to see the inside. Mine's still in the cave also. Getting pretty ansie to open it. Still fooling for that perfect mold for large stiltons. Yours has perfect proportions.
Quote from: wattlebloke on March 03, 2016, 06:02:13 AM
the slurry covers the bottom of the container in a thin layer.
This is absolutely brilliant! The cheeses seem to be resting on a white plastic grid - did that come with the 3.5L box and if so, where can I purchase a set up like that?
The boxes in the picture, complete with grid, are made by Decor. Don't know if you have them in the US?
I've searched for these. My conclusion was that they are unique to Australia. I could be wrong but I have not found them in the US. :'(
Quote from: John@PC on March 03, 2016, 12:20:09 AM
I am a believer in using saturated salt solutions for calibrating humidity sensors and they are effective in mini-cave environments; here is a link (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/salt-humidity-d_1887.html) with some good info. to "dial in" your target %RH.
I am intrigued by the control of humidity by use of a saturated salt solution. I learned about this a zillion years ago in my college Physical Chemistry class and promptly forgot about it after the final test. For grins I did a little research and came up with the pros and cons (http://www.conservationphysics.org/satslt/satsol.php)of using this method. I think that a shallow depth likely overcomes most of the cons.
What I could not find out is whether two salts would provide for intermediate results. If so, one could "dial a RH" with a blend of sodium and potassium chloride. Wouldn't that be fun! I think that I will try it and see. ;)
If you really want to get technical on saturated salt solution humidity control this is the report (http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/81A/jresv81An1p89_A1b.pdf)you are looking for. Binary in this case means the salt and solvent: potassium chloride and water, for example.
Whoa! That is one nice publication, Kern. If I understood the table on page 4 correctly, a saturated table salt solution at 10 degrees C will give me 76% relative humidity. Very useful. Thanks!
You are correct, Frodage3, but note that that applies to a saturated solution of Potassium Chloride (KCl), not ordinary table salt (sodium chloride, NaCl). The NaCl comes in at an RH of about 75% for most temperatures. That's why I wondered about a mixture of the two. Give credit to John@PC (page 2) for posting the original table and note that I had forgotten all about this over the past half-century.
I've found an inexpensive source of KCl and it is here. (http://www.bulkfoods.com/nutritional/4306-potassium-chloride.html) I did the math and this is about 99% KCl. You need pretty pure stuff to get this to work as per the table. There are cheaper sources on Amazon but the negative comments indicate that some particular brands have a lot of impurities. Buyer beware! I've purchased quite a bit of dried food from Bulkfoods over the past couple of years and highly recommend them.
Incidentally, KCl saturates at 360 grams of KCl per 1000 grams of water at 77F. So, do the math on the amount you need before ordering.
Quote from: wattlebloke on March 03, 2016, 07:38:22 PM
The boxes in the picture, complete with grid, are made by Decor. Don't know if you have them in the US?
You can get something very similar at Cash & Carry, a restaurant supply store, over here. The one is the photo is approx 9" x 11". They come in various sizes. Made by Cambro in Huntington Beach. http://www.cambro.com/Catalog/ (http://www.cambro.com/Catalog/)
Quote from: Al Lewis on December 22, 2015, 08:47:43 PM
The cheesecloth wall will also help to contain the blue mold from spreading throughout the room. I often lightly wrap my blues in a single layer of cheesecloth in my cave to help keep the roqueforte to itself.
Does that work well for you? I have the worst time keeping roq off the other cheeses. I have sanitized the cave, tried containers...still blue mold. Its relentless.
I still get the occasional spot of blue but hardly ever. I also keep the blue on the bottom shelf.
I'll admit this is a totally unexplored area but my chemical engineering background told me to try it out.
My own empirical experience so far is that you have to have a very big surface area of the sink to get a reasonable influence over the relative humidity in the space. I don't have enough data to prove anything single variably yet, but I get the feeling that the KCl sinks are just attenuating the natural humidity swings.
For example, I noticed 4-5 weeks ago that I was starting to lose a bit of mass in the weekly weigh ins and that a small tiny crack was starting to appear at one end on the crust. Humidity was a steady 85%.
I wasn't ready to pierce just then so I immediately added a hard surface to the cheese cloth wall. I leaned the large lid of the container against the cheese cloth wall so that I was reducing the air flow rate by at least 95% (I left the base away so some air movement could still take place). Humidity went up and stayed at a nice stable 90%+ and no more cracks. Logically, the kCl sinks should have started fighting this but they are clearly too small to win.
I've noticed that when I had the environment at 85%, I had to replenish them with water to keep a slushy saturated mixture, but now they are swimming in excess water (so essentially no longer sinks).
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Side note:
Alongside this Stichelton I made a big Cambozola wheel and tried a similar technique with it but slightly different. I made it a mini cave out of acrylic sheet glued together in a box and then laser cut large holes in the base and ceiling of the box (none of which you can see in the picture!). I then on a daily basis used pieces of plastic to cover or expose these holes and managed to maintain a pretty constant 95% humidity just from the cheese itself.
However, what I found was that the box started to act like a chimney and so there was a steady but small constant flushing of air but at high humidity. It really liked this and the PC grew like crazy.
My next project would be to combine the two mechanisms into a larger box and use a kCL sink with a very large surface area immediately below the base. Then I would use the natural convection to slowly pull air in over the sink before it goes into the cave area above through the holes and then out the top.
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The big thing for me is that the cheese itself is very happy. Really slow stable growth of the crust moulds. Nothing running away but everything growing nicely. Nothing bad looking on the outside, no blue run away, all interesting whites, browns and maybe a hint of pinks. Smells very nice and mellow. I think I've just been very lucky to find the right conditions for this particular cheese.
I'm supposedly 4 more weeks till I'm opening it up but I'm starting to climb the walls. I think I'm going to give up at Easter.
Something like this maybe:
Quote from: Al Lewis on March 06, 2016, 05:18:25 PM
Quote from: wattlebloke on March 03, 2016, 07:38:22 PM
The boxes in the picture, complete with grid, are made by Decor. Don't know if you have them in the US?
You can get something very similar at Cash & Carry, a restaurant supply store, over here. The one is the photo is approx 9" x 11". They come in various sizes. Made by Cambro in Huntington Beach. http://www.cambro.com/Catalog/ (http://www.cambro.com/Catalog/)
Thanks Al - I will check them out too.
Quote from: mikey687 on March 07, 2016, 09:54:43 PM
I'll admit this is a totally unexplored area but my chemical engineering background told me to try it out.
I like your engineering creativity. I am a chemical engineer also. My guess is that it takes some amount of time for the humidity in the air above a saturated salt brine mixture to reach equilibrium. Obviously, this can only happen in a closed container with a acceptable balance between the volume of air and surface area (and depth for the long term) of the brine. This balance and the geometry of the container creates some kind of rate to regain equilibrium in the case of an "upset". Most cheese wheels tend to dry in any situation where the RH is less than 100%. Here again the surface area of the cheese and moisture content (and mass for the long term) play a role. The driving force for drying is difference between the equilibrium RH for the salt solution and the humidity in the boundary layer of the cheese surface. I doubt that most cheeses give up moisture fast enough to overwhelm the capacity of the saturated salt solution to absorb the moisture. But, I don't know this for a fact.
Your design calls for the regulated intake of air. If the RH (and volume of air) is significantly different from the equilibrium RH you might not be able to reach equilibrium with the salt solution. Perhaps a closed container with a small fan would produce better results. I have a battery powered fan that I use to slowly circulate air in the refrigerator of my RV (motor home). That just might do it as the important thing is to remove the boundary layer of higher humidity air surrounding the cheese and get it above the brine solution to "de-water".
OK, so I'm back from a travelling holiday now and keen to get back into the RH game :) Some good ideas/discussion coming along here (and probably in the wrong section :))
How about using a small aquarium bubbler to circulate the air from the cave into the RH sink?
I think you're at the stage of engineering where you have to put the slide rule down and pick up a hammer and tongs and see if your idea works. ;)