Hi all,
I'm 8 months into cheese making and starting my 5th colby today. I'm wondering how precisely the temperature should be controlled during pressing brining and drying. I've heard that you can generate a lot of acid in the press, do people move the press into their cave once they reached desired acidity? Also similar for brining, should that be at room temperature or cave temperature? I've been using the cheesemaking.com recipe and consulting other online recipes and they really don't specify. It seems like temperature is a really important variable to control and should be a deliberate choice rather than just defaulting to room temperature.
I've had issues with the cheeses turning out way to acidic to the point of sour/bitter, and I think it was due to drying at room temperature (70-75f) for two days. I'm hoping to fix the mistake at this one, and starting to look into ph meters to buy (although $100us is a little more than I'm willing to spring for right now).
Thanks for the help!
Jacob
homemade cheese press pic
You have been making cheese longer than I, so I am certainly no authority on this matter! But from what I have learned so far I will try and answer your questions...
For pressing most of what I have read suggests that 72 degrees F is a pretty good place to be. So basically your typical "room temperature" is good because it isn't so warm that the fat in the cheese will melt and seep out, but isn't so cold that the curds won't knit together. Warmer temp leads to faster acidification, cooler temps slow things down. I just made a thread which mentioned how the pressing was taking longer than anticipated and I had to leave home for 6 hours, but I figured the acid level would be low enough sooner than that, so I put the cheese (in the mold) into my cave while I was gone to slow down the acidification so that it wouldn't go to far while I was gone. This seemed to work ok because I had already been pressing for a while so the rind was already closed and the cooler temps didn't keep the curds from knitting because that was already accomplished. Alternately, if your rinds isn't closed yet but you are quickly approaching the right acid level, you may consider moving the cheese to a cooler area to slow down acidification and buy yourself more pressing time to close up the rind. In Caldwell's book she mentions that you can adjust temps to suit your time constraints sometimes, you really just need to make sure that during pressing the curds knit and proper acidification levels are reached...everything else seems a bit more flexible.
For brining, I've seen that keeping your brine in the cave and brining at cave temps is good (usually 55 degrees F). I've also read that your cheese and your brine should be similar temps so that you don't shock the cheese by dropping it into significantly cooler brine. Since pressing usually happens at room temp, I suppose one should either let the brine warm up to room temp and then put the cheese in and move the container to the cave at that point, or you could put the cheese in the cave for 20-30 minutes right after pressing to acclimate to the brine's temp and then place it in the brine. With all this said, I've only remembered to do this on 1 out of my 3 cheeses so far, and nothing too catastrophic seems to have occurred :)
For drying, I do all of that in the cave. I take it out of the brine, dry it off a bit, and then start aging it in the cave immediately. I am not sure if there are certain cheeses that call for room temp drying after brining or not, but in my very limited experience drying in the cave seems like it works well.
Thanks for the reply! Your advice makes sense, I'll try to follow it. Since I don't have a ph meter I've just been tasting the whey running out of the press to gauge when it's starting to acidify. I pulled the cheese out of the press when the whey stopped tasting sweet, but wasn't tart yet. Hopefully this will be a mild cheese.
Thanks for the help and happy cheesing!
Good points, cheesehead94.
I have a few additional notes. When I make my Taleggio cheeses, they spend some time in an incubator (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,15871.msg121389.html#msg121389) which maintains 78F/25.5C. During the cooler Fall and Winter season when the ambient temperature can drop down to 65F/18C, the incubator helps keep the cultures happy and busy. It's important to monitor the pH during this time or when a cheese is in a press.
When I drain whey, I save a gallon or two for pressing under whey or for making whey-brine. The salt dissolves easily in the warm whey. Then, while the cheese is pressing and acidifying, the whey-brine is cooling in the cave. When the cheese has reached pH 5.3-5.4, it goes into the cave-temperature whey-brine. I prefer using whey-brine because it has the same calcium and pH levels as the cheese.
I have had good reliable service from my Extech PH100 meter (http://www.extech.com/PH100/). I can't imagine trying to hit the different pH marks without it: when to add rennet, when to drain whey, when to salt. Some recipes call for pressing a cheese overnight, but if you haven't salted or brined the curds and you've got an active culture that's eating up all the lactose really fast, it's not hard to see how the acidity could get out of control very quickly. It's important to be able to gauge pH quickly and accurately and be able to salt the cheese before it turns into a sour, chalky disaster. A pH meter is an investment into making better cheeses. Tip the odds in your favor and acquire a pH meter. ;)
-Boofer-
I have to agree whole-heartedly with Boofer on the pH meter.
I made cheese for a long time without one--some cheeses were great successes but others were not. The successes were a very strong intermittent positive conditioning--so I thought there was something outside my control that was affecting the less than great cheeses. NOPE.
Since I have been using pH rather than time alone, I've not had a single "unsuccessful" cheese, and even my really good ones are now fantastic.
As much as milk, cultures, refrigeration, molds, and you own time cost, a pH meter is a minimal investment that will reap fantastic rewards.
Do yourself a grand favor and get one-a good one--now, and you'll save yourself a lot of frustration.
(As an aside: Yes, I know folks have made cheese for centuries and continue to make cheeses without pH meters, but they were generally making only one or two cheeses famous to their region and the perfected a "feel" after apprenticing for a long time. Much like your grandma makes her biscuits without a recipe. But when we are trying to recreate a myriad of cheeses of different styles from different regions of the world, it's almost impossible to become that adept without something to hedge your bet...that is the pH meter.)
Yep, much more eloquent, Gort. ;)
-Boofer-
I agree with Boofer and Mike about the need ( not want ) of a PH Meter. I have a Hanna pocket meter that I currently use. If it was not for the disappointment of not being able to get !.5 V batteries or them not lasting more than a week ( climate here is very hard on batteries in Panama ) I would continue to use it. I have ordered a hand held Meter that uses the good old 9V and a piercing Electrode. Now if luck is with me, I will avoid the partials of low PH. I have been told by many people that one is not necessary but being amateur cheese enthusiasts and wanting to experiment with different types of cheeses and not to be restricted to one or two it is necessary to have one.
Quote from: panamamike on August 15, 2018, 08:54:59 PMI have been told by many people that one is not necessary but being amateur cheese enthusiasts and wanting to experiment with different types of cheeses and not to be restricted to one or two it is necessary to have one.
Makes life a lot easier. ;)
Mike, my dad (and family) was stationed in the Canal Zone in the early 1950's. I attended grades 1-3 there and have fond memories of iguanas, boa constricters, armadillos, guineps, and a 3-toed sloth in the mango tree outside my window. We lived on Ancon Hill in a development called Quarry Heights.
-Boofer-
Ancon is still a very nice area of Panama, I live out in the country and see many of the same animals you talk about. The first sloth I saw was crossing the road out here and coming up on it I thought it was a rag laying in the road. Sometimes we have close to 100 parrots in our orange grove behind our house.
Have to pick the oranges as soon as they start to ripen so they don't eat them all.
I bet that gets noisy! What does an almost ripe parrot look like? :D
Quote from: River Bottom Farm on August 18, 2018, 02:58:24 PM
I bet that gets noisy! What does an almost ripe parrot look like? :D
Exactly what I was thinking. And how do they taste? ;)
Alright, I will bite the bullet and get one of the extechs, they seem like the cheaper-but-acceptable way to go. Just for kicks, does anyone know how to tell ph by taste? There seems to be distinct phases of the whey tasting sweet, and then tart, with a little time neutral in between. Any rough guesses on how to use taste to estimate times, (aka if it tastes tart you've gone too far, or it should still be a little sweet or something).
I always taste things as I go when I'm doing any kind of food preparation and I've found that the taste buds can get pretty good at estimation. When I used to make beer, I could tell the specific gravity of the wort within 1-2 just by tasting it (although, that's was after 10-20 years of making beer once a week :-) ) For making jam, I can tell the correct pH by tasting it (around 3.2-3.4). For cheese it is a lot harder, though. Remember that pH is on a log scale. That means that the difference between going from 6 down to 5 is 10x the amount of acid as going from 7 down to 6.
In my jam making, if I'm somewhere in the ballpark of 3.2-3.4, then I'll get a good gel (and it won't be so bad even if I'm outside by a bit). But 0.2 in the range of 3-4 is 100x more acid than 0.2 in the range of 5-6. So my ballpark estimate in jam making can be off by more than the entire range of pH used in cheesemaking and it practically won't make a difference :-)
Having said that (and since I don't currently have a pH meter), I'm trying my best to get a grip on the flavours. I make lactic acid cheeses and I coagulate with acid rather than rennet. Milk curdles at a pH of 5.2 (I think -- I don't have my reference handy) at a temperature of 42 C (107 F). I use mesophilic cultures to bring the pH as close as I can without curdling the milk, and then I add a little bit of citric acid -- the idea being to get rid of the buffering capacity of the milk and then quickly add more acid to drop it down below 5.2. Later the curd will release more salts to buffer the acid and the pH can rebound a bit -- allowing me to produce non-rennet cheeses in pH ranges that you would't think possible.
In making that kind of cheese, it's pretty important to monitor the pH drop. What I've found is that at the top end (probably above 6.0), I can't taste any difference at all. As the cultures multiply, I actually notice the smell more than anything else. Unfortunately this is usually longer than most people will wait before adding rennet -- so after 90 minutes or so of ripening, the smell is pronounced. It's not until the milk starts to thicken (ever so slightly) that I can taste acidity in it (so I'm guessing in the mid to low 5 range). When I make the curds, if I've done everything correctly, then I'll presumably end up with a pH of 5.2 or above. If I ripen the milk less time and add more citric acid to form the curds, paradoxically I end up with sweeter curds. My reading of that situation is that there is more buffering capacity left in the casein and it buffers the pH, but only after the curds have had time to form. With those curds, I can't really taste any acid and I'm guessing the final pH is somewhere around 5.3-5.4. When I ripen the milk for 3 hours or so and use the minimal amount of citric acid, then my curds are slightly tart -- and I guess the pH is somewhere between 5.1-5.2. By the time it gets down to the 4.6 or 4.7 it is quite tart (just like yogurt -- or a fresh goat's cheese).
So hopefully that can give you some kind of guide (based on *my* taste buds and completely *unverified* guesses about the pH LOL). If I can get my hands on some rennet (i.e. liberate the credit card from my wife's protective presence), it might be fun to make some mozzarella and compare my perceived acid level vs. a stretch test. I *suspect* that you could train yourself adequately to detect the move into 5.1-5.3 pH range, based on my experience. But other than that, I think that it's kind of useless because all of the important pH milestones in the vat are waaay outside my taste threshold. YMMV!
While this thread has some good temperature information at the beginning, it turned into mostly a pH thread with some of the best arguments for the use of pH meters in cheese making that I have come across. My ExTech PH100 is on the way. Thanks folks.