I've been reading on the forum since I started making hard cheese last summer, and have found lots of helpful information, but I only joined recently. I'm pleased with the cheeses I'm making by this point (just finished the 38th batch), so I thought for my first post I'd try to contribute something to this community by sharing my process. As a beginner I found it intimidating to piece together the entire process of making a cheese based on a recipe and an assortment of articles, so I'm hoping this post will be helpful to other beginners as an example of one way to translate abstract information into a physical cheese. Often my visits to this forum remind me of just how much I have to learn, especially as I branch out into new recipes and am hoping to change some of my techniques, so if anyone spots blatantly bad practices or false assumptions, please bring them up so we can all learn.
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So far, I've used recipes almost exclusively from Ricki Carroll book Home Cheese Making. Although I've tried out a few different recipes, I usually stick with Farmhouse Cheddar, since it's the fastest hard cheese to make and for me cheesemaking is more in the category of food preservation than hobby. The process I describe below is centred around this recipe, although much of it applies to my attempts at Stirred-Curd Cheddar, Traditional Cheddar, and Leicester.
I keep notes on each batch of cheese, including date, batch size, recipe, estimated cream content, ambient temperature (I think this one's fairly useless, but I'm in the habit), and any deviations from the recipe (including additives like herbs) or special notes. I most frequently make skim-milk cheeses, since my family likes to use the cream for butter, whipped cream, sour cream, and ice cream, and we like sharper, dryer cheeses anyhow. I find these notes helpful for trying to replicate any cheeses that turn out particularly well.
When I started out, I was making 2-gallon batches in a single stock pot placed in a canner pot for a double boiler. I quickly learned that cheese-making is very time-consuming, so I switched to 4-gallon batches using two 2-gallon pots. These would be processed in parallel until the curd was hung to drain, then combined. I did sometimes notice textural variation between the two sub-batches while milling, presumably due to variation in culture/rennet temperature or variation in temperature increase rate during cooking of the curd, but these cheeses have turned out very satisfactorily. This is the system I have the most experience with. While this system certainly saved time, it took more attention to simultaneously monitor two pots, and I didn't like the variation it introduced within a single batch. When two of our cows freshened at similar times this spring, I was getting too much milk for this scale to be appropriate anymore anyhow (I was making hard cheese four times per week in addition to various soft cheeses and other dairy products), so I had a welder make a 10-gallon stainless pot for me. I've now made three 8-gallon batches in this new setup. While I won't get to taste the results for a couple months, the cheeses are still coming out of the press looking normal, so I think it's working. The pictures are a mix of the 4-gallon and 8-gallon setups.
For sterilization, I scald the milking bucket (4-gallon lidded plastic), the jars the milk is stored in, the pots, the utensils that contact the cheese until the curd-cooking stage (by which point I'm guessing my culture will have established itself), and the cheese cloths and mould. It's hard to say whether this system is excessive, but so far I haven't had any cheeses obviously "go bad" during aging, and the flavour/texture results are moderately consistent, so I can say that it seems to be sufficient.
Although Carroll recommends heating the milk to culturing temperature via water bath, I've switched to doing this initial heating directly on the stove. As far as I can tell, this is not having adverse effects on my results, and it has several advantages. It shortens the process slightly because I don't need to wait for the extra thermal mass of the water to heat to get the culture started. I can culture the milk, then heat my water during renneting and have it ready when I cut the curd. This also saves a little energy because the water bath water is not losing heat during the culturing and renneting steps. Also, in my new system where I'm working in a laundry tub, I have no direct way to heat the water in the water bath, so warming the milk from storage temperature up to culturing temperature would take a lot of water replacing/cycling and take a lot of time. My understanding is that the main risk with direct initial heating is that I'll have pockets of cool or warm milk and the culture will not develop evenly. I have not noticed any issues, so it seems that my thorough stirring right before adding the starter is working. Having had success with this practice in the 4-gallon batch size, I've taken advantage of it in my recent 8-gallon batches. The pot with a full 8 gallons of milk would weigh about 85 lbs. I currently have a broken leg, so lifting that off the stove into the tub would be challenging. Instead, I've been adding roughly 6 gallons to the pot, "overheating" it in proportion to exactly how much I added, then lifting it off the stove into the tub and adding the rest of the milk while still cold to bring the temperature down. I'm usually able to hit my culturing temperature to within a degree. Although I haven't yet tasted any cheeses made with this odd technique, I don't see why it shouldn't work. My only concern is that the overheating might somehow alter the milk's starting acidity.
Example calculation: T = (8 gal * 90°F - 2.2 gal * 47°F)/5.8 gal = 106.3°F
Obviously the units don't really matter - you could also calculate using inches of depth in the pot instead of gallons, for example.
I've been propagating my mesophilic starter in the "yogurt" style and freezing it. Since I find this process to be a bit of a nuisance, I sometimes cheat by using 3/4 the amount of starter recommended in the recipe and lengthening the ripening time slightly. I have no way of measuring pH, so this feels a bit chancy, but I haven't yet had any clear failures as a result of it. Although I doubt I'll ever get into the habit of monitoring pH for each batch (since I'm trying to keep the process technologically simple), I would like to test a few batches at some point to get a benchmark for what a good adjusted ripening time might be.
With the 4-gallon setup I heat the canner directly for cooking the curd. Since I don't have a large enough pot to make a water bath for my 10-gallon pot, I've been using a galvanized laundry tub. I can't heat it directly, so I've been cooking the curd by adding small amounts of hot water and removing some of the cooler water to heat. While this is relatively labour-intensive, it's attractive in that all it requires is a small and simple stove that can boil water (I would like to transition to exclusively using wood heat), and I can insulate the tub with blankets to conserve heat. With either process, I only monitor the temperature in the whey (not the water), and adjust my heat input according to how quickly it's rising. With 4-gallon batches, I sometimes have to pull the pots out of the canners if the water gets too hot, but with the 8-gallon batches this hasn't been a problem. I'm actually trying to increase my heating rate with that setup because currently the ~12°F rise takes a bit less than an hour, meaning I'm only heating at just over 1°F/5 min. rather than the recommended 2°F/5 min. I think cooking the curd is currently the least consistent part of my process, so I would guess it's the source of most of my variation in texture and flavour (due to acidity levels).
I've often hung my two 2-gallon sub-batches in separate cheese cloths to drain on the theory that otherwise the curd mass might retain too much whey. After all, the recipe I'm using is for a 2-gallon batch and gives no particular directions for scaling up. However, I know that it's also advantageous to retain as much heat as possible, so recently I've been putting it all in one cloth. Hopefully this will still work for my 8-gallon batches. I would estimate that they're coming out of the mould with the correct yield in terms of size and weight, so I don't think I'm seeing issues with whey retention.
My mould is a bit too small, so I often have to press for a few minutes before adding the last of the curd. I haven't had issues with this part knitting to the rest of the cheese, so it seems to be a decent work-around. The press is a 5x "Dutch style" press that I built after looking at some pictures of similar presses on this forum. I plan to add pulleys on the lever to provide an extra doubling of force for the final pressing, but that will have to wait until I'm done building my pole lathe! My main adaptation to Carroll's recipes has been to greatly increase the final pressing weights (somewhere in the 6-10 PSI range), since the weights given for most recipes seem to be very insufficient to provide a good knit of the curd.
Drying to produce a good rind generally takes 3-6 days around my house. I enjoy eating rind, so having a thick one doesn't bother me.
I wax by dipping in a dedicated crock pot. Having had some issues with mould entering through cracks, I've started doing three layers instead of two, and I think that works better. A paper label goes under the last coat.
My "cheese cave" is the root cellar in the basement. It gets relatively warm in the summer (up to about 60°F) and cold in the winter (as low as 34°F). Basically we keep it as cold as we can via air exchange with the outdoors for the sake of the root vegetables. Humidity is often good; 90-95%. Having completed nearly a year of cheese-making I can say that this fluctuating environment seems to be good enough for my purposes. The cheeses are placed on unfinished ash boards. If mold develops on a board, I scrub it with vinegar and put it in the sun for a day. Compared to this picture, I usually leave a lot more space between cheeses for good air circulation. As I said, the milk has been coming in quickly recently and I got behind with planing aging boards.
That's it! If any of this was unclear or more detail would be helpful, please ask questions.
Beautiful setup! AC4U!
Thanks for sharing your process. As I'm getting ready to move from 2 and 3 gallon batches to 4 gallon, I've been wondering about the ability to keep the temperature consistent throughout. Nice job.
On a side note, what kind of ventilation do you have in your root cellar? We've been battling mold this year, (first time since we built it in 2014 or so).
Quote from: Jen on July 05, 2021, 01:22:58 AM
On a side note, what kind of ventilation do you have in your root cellar? We've been battling mold this year, (first time since we built it in 2014 or so).
For context, my family built our root cellar from insulated garage door panels in the corner of our cellar. It's roughly 9'x10'. The house is about 160 years old, so the two sides that are foundation wall are mortared field stone. The floor is concrete, and the ceiling is a layer of plywood holding insulation against the wood floor of the upstairs.
There was a window in a well on one of the walls, so we filled that with a panel and installed vent openings in it. Each opening has a homemade sliding door, so we can open and close them to control airflow. The one on the left is for cold air intake; that 6" corrugated pipe goes to the floor in the diagonally opposite corner of the room. The idea is that cold air will naturally fall down that tube and push warmer air out the vent on the right. We often have the doors at least partly open through the winter to hold the temperature down in the 30s for the produce, so there's good ventilation then. In the spring and fall we can often open them at night to catch a little more cold (this is particularly important for bringing the temperature down in the fall) and provide ventilation, but through much of the summer it never gets cool enough to open the doors, so there's very little ventilation.
So far we haven't had a lot of trouble with mould. We definitely have some, and the smell isn't great, but I'd say it's fairly well under control. That said, we only built our root cellar two years ago, so it's possible we just haven't encountered the wrong set of conditions yet. Most surfaces that don't contact food are whitewashed, which I think helps to some extent. If my cheese boards develop some mould, I scrub them with vinegar and leave them in the sun for a few days. As long as the wax doesn't have cracks or holes, it seems to keep mould out of the cheeses pretty well.
You've likely already done a decent amount of research in order to build your root cellar, but a book I would recommend is Mike and Nancy Bubel's
Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables. In addition to details about the storage requirements for lots of different foods, they provide guidance about design/construction, including some information about temperature, humidity, and ventilation.
Thanks so much for the explanation and picture. I have that book. It's very good. We actually dug a hole in the ground and made a root cellar out of trees on our property and pallets. The soil here is very rocky, so we didn't have to worry about erosion, and we wanted something cheap. We plan to redo it in the spring with "real" lumber. I think our vent pipes were too small - 4", and we will go to 6" next year. We ended up opening up the top hatch for a week, and that dried everything out, but the temp climbed to 59 degrees. I'll take it though because I only like mold on my cheese :)
Thanks again for the explanation and showing us your great setup.
That's neat! I can certainly appreciate trying to do things cheaply. My family is working a lot on how to live using local resources (especially ones we can harvest ourselves), so the way we built this cold cellar was definitely a compromise.
I gather that you have earth walls and floor? Have you had any problems with rodents? We had some rats dig into our cellar last year, first through the floor where we had left a patch of dirt, and after we filled that, through the plywood ceiling. We've covered the ceiling with wire mesh, and that's stopped them, but it makes me wonder how well earth walls could work here. Our soil has plenty of rocks, but also plenty of clay - maybe if it were sandier that would make it harder for them to tunnel.
Yes, we do have earth walls and floor. I am rather surprised myself that we haven't had a gopher problem. The rodents here usually stay above 18" or so from the top of the soil, and our cellar is lower than that, so that's probably why we haven't had the problem so far. Every now and then I get worried that a bear will break into it, but bears are too smart to jump into a dark hole in the ground. At least, that's what I tell myself. :) They are smart enough to open doors though. I once watched a cub sitting like a watch tinker trying to open a Home Depot tool box.
I'm really glad to hear that the fluctuating temps have worked for your cheese. As soon as fall comes and the temps start dropping, I'll move my cheeses out there. Our temp range is similar to yours, and I think it will be fine for the natural rinds I have done so far, since we'll consume them before the temps warm up again. I'll have to learn to wax cheese this year. I wonder if that's one of the reasons you've had good success with the temperature ranges.