Here are two pictures of my first experimental cheese batch with "surface features" that I'd like to have cleared up, since I am only just starting out.
The 3 cheeses are rennet coagulated and unpressed. I used only kefir as a culture (I already mentioned elsewhere that I want to experiment with Kefir), the milk was 3 l pasteurised, non-homogenized, full fat cow milk. When stirring the curds they partly broke into smaller pieces, so I suspect I didn't get to the clean cut stage. So the texture looks a bit crumbly, but anyway. After dry salting and a day of drying at room temperature they have been in the "cave" at about 9° C for a week.
Two of the cheeses are washed with with b. linens every other day that I harvested from a French Munster. The third one is just left as it is to see what happens. The cheeses are flipped daily.
The first picture is the untreated cheese. The blue mould looks like p. roqueforti to me, probably a "contamination" because I had also been cultivating some PR on a slice of bread in a Tupperware box. I am not sure about the white fluff. It seeems too short for cat fur. Could it be p. candida? I certainly didn't add any and I am not aware that kefir contains it.
The second picture shows the other two cheeses with what I believe is the beginning of a b.linens rind. At last they smell milldy of it. Right?
Your "white fur" appears to be penicillium candidum. Have you done any brie or camemberts lately? The mold could have transferred from one of them or remained in the cave.
Quote from: Al Lewis on October 15, 2015, 12:56:52 PM
Your "white fr" appears to be penicillium candidum. Have you done any brie or camemberts lately? The mold could have transferred from one of them or remained in the cave.
No, but I wouldn't rule out that some spores are drifting around since I occasionally eat bloomy rinded cheeses.
Thinking about it, I may have PC spores anyway in the air. I am also making cured sausages and I usually get a little white mould on the skin which may well be PC. But perhaps it's also p nalgiovense which is commonly used as a culture for salami. But I don't knw if this would grow fluffy on cheese. It certainly would not be harmful
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26251231 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26251231)
I also just made salami using Penicillium Nalgiovense but I'm not sure it appears as a white fur. Mine seems to be quite different in appearance from Penicillium Candidum. I could be wrong however as my salami is still in it's early stages. PC seems to grow a lot slower than the PN though. https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=14998.0;attach=38701;image (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=14998.0;attach=38701;image) https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=10862.0;attach=23595;image (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=10862.0;attach=23595;image)
Mine looked pretty much the same when it was finished. I didn't use a culture, it just appeared naturally but I didn't get nasties. So the atmosphere in my basement that I use for curing and cheese seems to be begnin.
Here is an update and another question.
Now the cheese seems to be covered a mix of geo, PC and PR. PR is only strong on one side. (First picture)
In the mean time I made three more cheeses, this time semi-lactic. After dry salting and a day of drying at room temperature I've had them for a week open in a basement room at 16 degrees Celsius and 85% RH. I will put them into my 9 degree fridge in a closed box tomorrow. The second picture shows one of those cheeses with a light coating of geo and again some blue. Again this looks very much like p. roqueforti to me.
I suspected it to be a cross-contamination from my natural pc culture on dried bread that I keep in a jar in the kitchen. But then again it may well be a wild strain. My question is: are wild PR strains risky? Somewhere I read that they may produce some different metabolites than cultured strains. On the other hand there are many artisan cheeses that have a natural dusting of blue and there are cheesemakers who make a wild blue cheese.
Wild blue is perfectly safe on cheese , but the flavor is any ones guess.
Definitely looks to be PR. I know there are very persistant strains of the stuff. Every time I age a blue in my cave I have to wash it out with a bleach/water solution to get rid of it. I've taken to loosely wrapping my blues in butter muslin while they are in the cave to help to contain it. I also keep them on the bottom shelf. Seems to help although the Vacherin Mont D'Ors seemed to pick up a bit of it anyway.