I made my first Stilton in February. I scraped it as in the recipes. The cultures were Flora Danica, Geotrichum and P. Roquefortii. It developed a good mould rind quite quickly and sat at 12C in my ageing room until now. I did some tests with a trier and it tasted good but still had an ammoniacal smell so as per the recipes if decided to give it a few more weeks but rather than drying out it got more and more unpleasant and began leaching a brown fluid. Finally today I cut it in half. To me it looks over ripe past the point where I want to eat it but this is only 12 weeks so it shouldn't even be ripe yet. Is my mistake to take the guidelines in the recipes too seriously? I know smaller cheeses mature faster but this 10l ( 2 gallon) one seems to have beaten me. Its a bit disappointing but this is my first failure so I suppose I can't be too upset. I wonder if anyone has any ideas what I did wrong?
Bummer. Sounds like your aging space was possibly a bit too warm and moist. Do you have a way to control temp? I would aim for 45° F/7° C.
yes I think you could well be right - I'm stuck between 4C and 12C one to cold and the other too warm. It hasn't affected any of the other 25 cheeses I have made including two Shropshire blue which are not radically different from Stilton. I think maybe the curd was too wet early on.
I recently had a spate of similar problems with blues going soft and ripening really quick. I am not sure if this is what is happening in your situation, but it might be helpful.
Based on the changes I made, it was a combination of too much moisture in the curds (the cheese would never really dry out after pressing) and not using enough mesophilic starter culture.
I started by cutting the curds a little smaller, which made a little bit of difference (I am after a firmer blue rather than a creamy one) but didn't solve all the problems. And then I increased the amount of starter culture and that seems to be working. The last blue I made turned out great and the one currently aging seems to be tracking along the same.
thanks Jules. I think you are spot on. The initial curds were probably too moist and it led to a cheese which was more like a soft french blue than a Stilton. The two Shropshire blues I have made have worked perfectly in similar ageing conditions.
Blues are a bit tricky that way. The main thing, I think is to keep the rind as dry as you possibly can. Because the cheese is moist, that's a bit of a problem.
I don't think they use Geotrichum in Stilton. It is likely the addition of it also contributed to over ripening the cheese resulting in ammonia and soft texture. 12 weeks of aging is overkill for a cheese that small. A wheel of Stilton is over 7 kg. I personally think it is better to assess if the cheese is ready or not by tasting and smelling it during maturation than following a recipe's aging time. From experience, a blue cheese that already has an ammonia smell, aging it longer will make it worse. I made small blue cheeses before (4-5l cow's milk) and in 23-40 days it is ready to eat. Now, I am aging a 1.25 kg blue cheese made from 6l buffalo milk, I don't intend to age it over 60 days.
I think I'm trying to run before I have learned to walk .. That balancing act between sufficient dryness in a moist cheese is clearly a skill. I think Aris is probably right about Geotrichum. I used a recipe from Artisan cheese making by Paul Thomas which includes it, although I see it is not in the Cheesemakers.com recipe, neither is it in my two Shropshire blues which are looking good. I have successfully made Triple creme, camembert and a washed rind monks cheese all of which use geotrichum but they are MUCH softer cheese than stilton should be. The centre of the stilton I have just thrown out had the consistency of a soft french blue ,not a stilton. Certainly the ammonia did not get less but overpoweringly more! I also agree that using your nose is much better guide than the recipe. Thankyou both for the really useful comments
I also agree that geotrichum is a weird and unnecessary addition to a Stilton. I missed that initially. My guess is that they wanted to control the growth of blue on the outside of the cheese. However, I think you are far better off trying to deal with that via keeping the humidity down.