Hi everyone, I apologize if this has been discussed before but I'm looking for some guidance regarding mold sizing for large cheeses. Specifically I am going to make a 20 gallon batch of parmesan and I am going to make a custom mold for it. I just would like to know what dimensions to make the mold so that it has appropriate height to diameter ratio, not too flat and not too tall. In the future I would like to able to calculate the dimensions for upcoming large cheeses. Thanks for any input!
From google I found this
The average Parmigiano-Reggiano wheel is about 18–24 cm (7–9 in) high, 40–45 cm (16–18 in) in diameter, and weighs 38 kg (84 lb).
I would make it proportionately smaller. Hopefully someone on here with parmesan expertise will put in there two cent.
Welcome to the forum
Cheese has almost exactly the same density as water (just a little over -- which is why it floats in brine, but sinks in plain water). This means that you can estimate the volume of curd you will get simply by the weight. The metric system is the easiest since 1 kg of water takes up 1 liter (1 liter == 1000 cm3, remember) of space, so I would start with that. Each cm of height in the mold will hold the weight of cheese equal to the area of the mold. So if the mold is 20 cm in diameter, its area is (20 / 2)^2 * pi = ~314 cm2 (yes, I chose it because the math is easy ;-). That means that every cm of height of cheese in the mold will weigh 314 grams.
I noticed that parmesan wheels are about half the height that they are wide. So ideally, for a 20 cm mold, we would want 10 cm of height, which would be 3.14 kg of cheese (Easy math again :-) ). Keep in mind that you need a little more room to allow the curd to settle, although for a parmesan you probably don't need that much since the curd is quite dry. Normal aged yield for parmesan is about 8% so 3.14 / 0.08 = very close to 40 liters of milk. So I can tell you that a 20 cm mold is too small (more's the pity for my easy math!) But we can work backwards! Keep in mind that the total weight is r^2 * pi * r which is exactly the same as r^3 * pi. (In our example, the radius is 10 cm so 10^3 = 1000, pi = 3.14 and the total cheese weight is 3140 grams).
20 gallons is almost exactly 90 liters. 90 kg of milk * 0.08 = 7.2 kg. That means we have 7200g of cheese. cube root(7200 / pi) is just over 13 cm. As it happens a 10.5 inch diameter mold will accommodate about 7.4 kg of cheese, so I think that's pretty much perfect.
20 gallons into Parm is not a very large cheese - pretty typical size for a lot of commercial producers.
Cheese Connection sells "Tomme" molds that would work. Glengarry sells parm molds:
https://glengarrycheesemaking.us/collections/italian-cheese-moulds/products/italian-hard-cheese-mould-en
https://glengarrycheesemaking.us/collections/italian-cheese-moulds/products/italian-hard-cheese-mould-en-2
Note that you can stack these ones but you need an additional mold to function as follower for each stack. And you can't underfill these molds or the top mold won't reach the curd.