Saffron infused cow milk cheese

[sigma2]

I'm a fairly newbie cheesemaker.  This is my 15th cheese.  I'm using the Saffron infused cheese recipe from cheesemaking.com sans the peppercorns.  I don't have a large cheese basket, only a large cheese hoop, so I cut the recipe to a 2 gallon batch so I could use my 2 lb cheese basket.  (see recipe...you soak the baby cheese after an 8lb press in the hot whey in the basket)  After following the recipe, I still wound up with 2 almost full "2 lb" size cheese baskets.  Not a huge deal, but why would I get so much more curd from 2 gallons of milk?  I cut the curd at 1/2 inch, and cooked per the recipe.  You are supposed to make ricotta with the whey you take off the top, heated to 180F, adding some citric acid to help the process, and while mine had some ricotta curds, I did not get any ricotta cheese out of my whey.  It's pH was around 5.0.  I'm baffled.  I guess I'll find out in a few weeks how the cheese turns out, but I'm curious on the troubleshooting.  What do you true curd nerd think?