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Hello everyone! I will be making my first raw milk cheese on Monday and I have decided on a washed curd cheese. Could you help me figure out some details please?!

I want the cheese to:

• Have a medium ph, so that the raw milk bacteria flavors aren't hidden behind a huge lactic acid punch
• Require only a moderate amount of aging to be yummy (3-6 months)
• Taste similar to a Gouda

In order to achieve this my current plan is to roughly follow a recipe from the Caldwell book called "same-temperature light-brine washed curd cheese." Does anyone have tricks, comments, advice, or smart remarks?

So you want it to taste like a Gouda, so are you making Gouda?  I would use a culture Flora D or mm100 the help producing the buttery flavor and drain before 6.3 as to starve the bacteria for a sweeter cheese.  One thing to remember raw milk needs half as much culture (as far as my experience goes) I loosely use Peter Dixons recipe.  If you have a ph meter the final cheese I shoot for is around 5.4. 

I use a combo of Kazu + Flav 54 after exhaustive trials of various cultures singly and in combination--and I only used pasteurized milk from my goats--great flavor after 1.5 months, even better up to 2 yrs