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Hi,

I'm new to cheesemaking but very lucky to live next to a dairy farm. My first cheese was a David Asher style camembert, and then I tried triple creme and blue. I'm using kefir to inoculate the milk. And of course coronavirus came and I had to put the whole thing on pause. Meanwhile, none of my cheeses, no matter how long I aged them, turned runny. They all have eyes, the camemberts numerous and small, while triple cremes the size of peas or bigger. They taste good, but not great. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Btw, I think this forum is great.
Thanks in advance!

Hello! Its nice to see you here.
Do you use raw or pasteurized milk? Kefir can produce some gas - this is not the right cheese culture. It is better to use buttermilk as a meso or yogurt as a thermo

I always get in trouble discussing David Asher  His recipes are quite simple and they are easy for a beginner to do, but he really glosses over some of important parts of cheese making.  To get a runny cheese you need 4 things: The cheese needs to be acidic enough before you salt it.  So this means you should make sure that you drain the cheeses for 12-24 hours before salting them.

The next thing is that the shape needs to be correct.  The runniness comes from ammonia produced by white mold/yeast growing on the outside of the cheese.  The more mold/yeast that grows, the more ammonia it will produce and the more runny the cheese will be (as long as it started out acidic enough at the beginning -- I'll skip the chemistry of why that's important for now).  Long story short, you need a high surface area to volume ratio, which basically means you need a short cheese.  Making it no more than about 3-5 cm high (1.5 - 2 inches) will accomplish that.

Next, you need to have the correct mold and or yeast.  David Asher is just basically wrong on this stuff.  He says that kefir contains geotrichum candidum (a white mold-like yeast).  Well... *some* kefir does (including the kefir he has), but not all kefir does.  You can cultivate it from the wild, but his techniques *will not work* for doing that.  I have to resist the urge to go on a rant because his book is just so full of errors like this that it's maddening.  Additionally, geotrichum candidum is *not* what you want for Camembert or Triple Creme style cheeses.  You really want penicillium candidum.  Buy a DVI culture, or scrape some off of a commercial Camembert/Brie style cheese (scraping the white off of one side of a Camembert an putting it in your milk will be *more* than enough -- it doesn't take much).

Finally, you need to wait.  You should get good white mold coverage in 2-3 weeks in the cheese fridge, but then you should transfer into the normal fridge and leave it for another 4-5 weeks.

And welcome! :-)

m4rek - I used raw milk, since live by a dairy. I was following David Asher's recipe.
mikechar - I have very little experience to comment either way, except that I would have to agree with you on Geo. I don't think kefir contains it unless using raw milk, which does. I've tried to grow Geo using kefir with raw and pasteurized milk, and it worked only on raw milk. As far as other elements, I did use the right form and aged in both a cheese cave and then regular fridge, to an overall 10-12 weeks (I had 3 little wheels). Judging from what you say, it must be the mold as I did drain it long enough. I'll try getting DVI cultures. Thanks for explaining. And I'm glad to be here. )