Hi from Washington state

[kyllo34]

Hello, my name is Andrew and I love eating cheese. About a year and a half ago i started making my own yogurt and decided to try my hand at making cheese and have been making cheese every week since then. Im fortunate enough to be able to source quality raw milk from a local dairy whos cows are all pasture raised and grass fed. I generally try to take a natural approach to cheesemaking using only thermophilic and mesophilic clabber as my starter cultures which comes with its own challenges but it is very rewarding when a cheese turns out tasty.

[tecla]

Hi Andrew! Which part, roughly, are you from in WA? I have some family there, one near Tacoma and one near Redmond.

Using clabber is indeed a bit tricky, but as long as the clabber ends up looking smooth and no real gas bubbles, it can turn out really well.

How do you isolate your thermophilic clabber from the meso? I have incubated mine at 110 long enough that I'm pretty certain the meso cultures are dead, and hope for the best. The result definitely smells and tastes like a yogurt.

Have you used any DVI adjunct cultures, say propionic acid bacteria for swiss styles, or PR for blues?

Welcome to the forum!

[kyllo34]

Hello! Im in Puyallup. Ive been making some larger Comte and Raclette like cheeses so i created a thermophilic  clabber from my meso. I basically fed some of the meso to some raw milk at 1:50-1:100 and incubated until it set(turn into a gel similar to the meso clabber) and repeated this feeding with fresh milk about 3 times or so until it would set within 6 hours. I just refrigerate both cultures until i get fresh milk each week. I have yet to use any kind of commercial starters for my cheeses actually. I even cultivated my own PR by letting some of my homemade sourdough mold over and scraping some of the most blue onto a new piece until completely consumed. Ive only used it to make camembert blue but the results were great!

[kyllo34]

I figured it would be fun to share some pictures. One is a Gruyere style cheese and the other is 3 cheeses i made from the same batch of milk, all inoculated with clabber and my PR that i made. From left to right is a muenster, camembert, and camembert blue. https://immich.kyllofamily.com/share/AA6f9ljZZBquE8gUMdpLQ1CNKktI3zHhLIsvFIZdrixrraqjVRXk4DcrLLEREDnuaNk

[tecla]

Very cool. Those are great-looking wheels!

You're thermo clabber process matches my experience pretty closely, although I go straight from raw milk into incubation for the thermo rather than building from the meso clabber.

I've never done the natural blues, any wild blues I've seen here taste...not so great. That may mean they're not real penicillin, but are yeast-like instead. Whatever they are, they're gross. I'm also allergic to penicillin, which means I need to be a bit careful about which penicillin strains I encounter to make sure they don't really produce the compound that gets a reaction. It sounds like you have a winner, though.