I have been following the basic recipe for gouda on the website. I have a very crappy homemade mold setup thing going here and I pressed the cheese for 1 hour with 4lbs of weight so far, but I just bought a real cheese mold. Is it too late to change the mold? The cheese has sort of set, its not hard or anything, so can I just squeeze it into the smaller mold? I still need to press it for another 3 hours at 10 lbs and than 8-16 hours with 25 lbs.
Sorry to answer so late in the game. You probably could have at the hour mark, but ideally it's best to wait till your next make to use your new mold. You might have ended up with mechanical openings in your cheese, which aren't the end of the world, and you might still end up with some if the pressing weight isn't heavy enough. Research pressing weight. If you need to make the switch, a good idea would be to reserve the whey to heat the curds back up to help them knit together better.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, but I had already made the change, lol. I admit, it wasn't my finest idea, and it came with one repercussion: The cheese ended up slanted. Because the curd was sorta set a little, I couldn't get the curds level in the mold and I added weight to balance it but it didn't work.
But I will keep this post in mind for the solution you provided.
Here is a link to my post chronicling my attempt with this cheese if your curious at all.
https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,6371.msg45362.html#new (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,6371.msg45362.html#new)
I saw your post. Good pics. I'm terrible at posting pictures, only rarely get to it.
Well I'm fairly new to the whole cheese making process so I feel I have to chronicle EVERYTHING that I do differently to get the max benefit from this forum... It also makes me laugh when my friends get queasy from hearing that I will keep cheese in a box for a month and they get to see the pics of facebook. Lol!
You get a cheese for your chronicling!
Haha! I was wondering how it knew that I made two cheeses. Thanks for telling me, now I have a real incentive to take pics, hahaha