I'm currently draining a few wheels of what was intended to be a croûte fleurie, but I'm worried that I may not have used a sufficiently active starter culture. Where do I go from here?
For some background: I was ecstatic to discover that my second experiment with clabbering milk had finally worked after a full week on the countertop (68F, after warming initially to 100F). It took longer than I'd expected but eventually formed a smooth, tangy curd. By this point it was plenty sour so I went ahead and used about 2oz to culture 1gal raw milk for a croûte fleurie. Not really knowing what to look for after the ripening phase, I went ahead and pitched my rennet after 60m. The milk coagulated nicely and is set to drain overnight now, but the curds and whey both taste like milk--no acidity whatsoever. (Tomorrow I'll check the pet shop down the street for pH strips to post a more accurate reading if I can.)
How can I tell if my cheeses are under-ripened? What can happen? My worry is that they'll (1) taste bland or (2) allow less-desirable cultures to proliferate in my aging space. Is there anything I can do to get a croûte fleurie, or even just a tasty cheese?
Someone suggested a while ago that milk that takes a week to clabber is not really sound milk to be making cheese from, so keep that in mind. The longer the milk lasts at room temperature without going sour, the more likely that you'll get undesirable bacteria breeding up and potentially forming a big enough population to poison the milk. In fact, this may actually be the problem with your milk -- the lactic acid bacteria has too much competition to flourish. So with that in mind...
As far as the cheese is concerned then I don't think it really matters. It frequently takes me 2-3 days to drain semi-lactic or lactic cheeses before I salt them (remember, these are acidic, so there is some added safety there). However long it takes, that's when you salt it.
If it were me, though, it would already be in the bin.
Thanks for the insight, I hadn't heard that explanation before. Is the idea that the souring specifically is a product of the cultures I want for cheesemaking, and that a long clabber indicates relative weakness of those cultures? I guess I'd been trusting my taste buds when I called it a success.
At any rate, the whey running off this morning definitely has more acidity to it (enough that I wouldn't want to drink more than a few spoonfuls of it, which is more than can be said of the whey left behind in the pot). The pet shop, however, only carries strips that will measure a pH between 6 and 9, so I'm left to my sense of taste. Can you give any indication of what I should expect for a croûte fleurie? I've made some lactic cheeses before, so I have that as a point of comparison.
Quality raw milk - when warmed up to body temp and allowed to sit at a warm room temperature - should clabber in 24, maybe 48 hours.
At that point it will have a nice smooth curd (no bubbles), a bit of whey at the sides/surface, and a lovely buttermilk aroma.
If it smells strange, has bubbles, has little flakey bits of curd and lots of whey, floating curd, etc, the raw milk has undesirable bacteria and that source is not fit for use for cheesemaking (at least not w/o pasteurization).
If the milk takes a long time to clabber, it may simply be because the milk was too cold (the lactofermentation test I described should actually be done in an incubator; however I have found that heating the milk to 100° and then keeping it in a warm spot in the house is usually sufficient). But clabber should be doable without an incubator (larger volume of milk will hold the temp).
Reluctant clabbering could also be due to sanitizer residue in the milk. Or enzymatic reaction inhibitors - though I can't seem to find much info on this (high somatic cell count? I don't know). Or too little lacto-bacteria, which can be an issue if there are other contaminating bacteria as they will become the dominating population, at the expense of milk/clabber quality and safety.
If this is your first bloomy rind effort, I recommend using a purchased culture for the first batch or several so that you can minimize the variables.
If you want to work with the clabber culture, I would go through a few generations before using it for cheese. It sounds like it came around in the end, so a spoonful of that added to fresh milk should clabber in a day and be a higher quality culture. Letting milk/clabber sit out for a week will allow undesirable molds to proliferate and that will make it hard to produce a nice clean white rind.