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Oo, nice!

Iii'm thinking that if Alp's recipe doesn't work for me next week I'm going to try yours.

If I read correctly you had no ripening time?

Not true, as I mixed the cultures into a half jug of the milk before heating the ripening time was the entire time it took to heat up.

Okay.

The ripening time at 80° may well be shortened however, if this thing keeps blowing up. 

To make sure it doesn't blow up?

Well at this rate it will look like a basketball in a month.  Keep in mind this cheese weighs 6 pounds and is 8" x 4".  It's REALLY getting bigger. LOL

Also, is that the unknown neon yellow mold on the outside?

Camera's on it's last leg. LOL

I'm just seeing a ton of yellow patches.

Yeah, it also has a tendency to put in vertical lines at times.  One of the wife old cameras I use because it's easy to pull the SD card and download it.  Trust me, there is NO neon yellow mold on this cheese.

Quote from: Al Lewis on March 28, 2015, 08:11:52 PM
Yeah, it also has a tendency to put in vertical lines at times.  One of the wife old cameras I use because it's easy to pull the SD card and download it.  Trust me, there is NO neon yellow mold on this cheese.

Am I the only one who's seeing this?

You definitely deserve a huge cheese AL

Quote from: Stinky on March 28, 2015, 08:23:25 PM
Am I the only one who's seeing this?

No, everyone sees it, but as Al says its a camera artifact.
If you look at the top picture there are no signs of the spots but the bottom picture taken several frames later has them.
They are probably the sensor heating up and becoming noisy. If you set the camera up and took a shot every 30 seconds you would probably see them growing.

Stinky,

This recipe is largely the result of Me and Al working out and trobleshooting my recipe which is taken from very large cheeses (I make my Emmentaler in 80 to 100 gallon batches...) and figuring out how to make it work for a small at home make. For many cheeses this is simple, for Emmentaler it is anything but.

So I recommend using Al's recipe. SOme time I'll go back to my small batch Emmentaler post and edit it with what we have worked out here.

A little insight for the rest of the world, me and Al worked on the problem of not swelling, and for my part I focussed primarily on the issues of over acidification and over salinization, so in simple terms we worked out the details to give the Thermophilic cultures less time to drop the pH of the cheese, and put the cheese into the brine for a very minimal amount of time to ensure PS could thrive, which it has.

Perhaps Al can give some more insight into his side of things -it's his cheese after all, I don't know anything beyond out conversations before the make.

But I must admit, my failure to convey an Emmentaler recipe that works well for small batches had been bothering me. So Al's success, for me, feels like a major victory. I think now I understand the issues you will face with a small cheese.

Al,

80 degrees seems a little plenty, I like between 70 and 75 myself. I'd be afraid it would swell so fast it cracks, or of the rind getting out of hand, at that temperature.

But hey, great job, I couldn't be happier to see this success!

My Emmentalish took around 30 hours in the press to get to a low enough pH.