Jazz and cheesemaking have something in common...improvising!
About 3 weeks ago I made my second batch of provolone, using the same recipe as my "frankencheese provolone thread". This was the first time I had ever made a cheese twice, since I'm just starting and want to try new stuff all the time. But the first time I made provolone it came out really well and I felt with some minor tweaks (namely, not over stretching) I could take that cheese from good to great. Anxious to try again, I ran into a common problem in my cheesemaking...buffering. The ph just wouldn't drop, but I kept chugging along through the recipe, not waiting too long at any step because I didn't want to throw other factors off. I started the make at 8 am, and at 2 am the next morning the curd was just starting to stretch. I was tired, frustrated, and had other obligations the next day so I couldn't put it off until the next morning. I knew the curd wasn't stretching quite enough, but I went ahead and formed shapes. Well, that didn't go too well and my teardrop shapes had lots of tears, openings, and crevasses due to this. I was very unoptomistic, but hung them up in the cave after brining anyways. Despite my best efforts over the last three weeks I just haven't been able to keep mold out of the many openings in the rind, and lately the mold has begun to take over.
So, today I took a vegetable peeler to them and shaved off the mold . There were some pretty gnarly mold intrusions as well, so I lost a good amount of cheese in the process, but hopefully I'll save the rest! I am now submerging them in an olive oil/vegetable oil blend and putting that container in the cave for another couple months. I know aging in oil isn't ideal, but it seemed like the only way forward at this point.
Here are some pics (before, after, and the shavings in the sink)...one of them looks purple because I experimented with washing one of them in wine brine, which failed to keep mold away too haha.
Cant win them all. Oil should do the trick. You could also cold smoke them to help keep the mold down
Yep, you win some and you lose some in cheesemaking!
Well, it's been approximately 3 months, so today I raised my provolones from the oily depths. They were pretty mangled, as described in a previous post, so I figured I would just make them into shredded cheese.
I gotta say, this is a fantastic cheese. I wouldn't describe it as provolone (although i've never had aged provolone before), and due to the turmoil in the make, it stops just short of a typical pasta dilata texture. It is definitely dry, but not unpleasantly so. Intensely umami flavor, really nice and deep. Melts nicely too.
This is a good example of how you can have a lot of miscues wen making cheese, but if you do enough things right you can still get an edible and tasty product.
Great save. AC4U!