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Hi, 

I started a Cacciotta yesterday. I used Raw goats milk for it.  EVeyrthign seemed to go pretty well.  This morning I put it in brine for about an hour since my cheese surface area was less than that of the source recipe (NE CheeseMaking.com) .  Anyway, I noticed it looks shiny and feels slimy now, less than 8 hours after I took it would of the brine.  Is it salvageable?

That happened to me once when I was starting to make cheese, turns out I built the brine according to the recipe and did not add enough Calcium Chloride.

If it's greasy/slimy it may actually be yeasts growing on the rind.  It's a good sign.  Keep the cheese relatively low humidity until it has a chance to get rid of the excess moisture.  You'll find that it is slippery/slimy, with the rind getting a bit tan colored.  I recommend just rubbing it everyday with a clean finger to keep the yeasts smoothed out.  It will slowly get tacky and then you'll see that it goes white from the geotrichum yeast blooming.  8 hours is fairly quick for this to happen, but it's more likely that than the brine if it wasn't slimy right out of the brine.

Thank You!  The recipe had called for it to be put straight away into the cheese cave.  For me that is the basement but in a plastic container to keep humidity.  If I read the directions correctly, I was to do this right after brining.  However, a Bel Paese I did had me wait awhile at room temp after brining before putting in the cheese cave, so I took the cacciota and have it out to dry off a bit.    I used Gavin Webbers recipe for brine but my egg floated after only 11 oz of salt.  Could it be I need to add more salt?  Thanks again.

More salt.... about 20% by weight....

Bob

Yeah, if you are light on salt geotrichum will grow like gangbusters.  That's probably the reason.

In terms of aging advice, the best piece of advice is to ignore almost all of the aging instructions in recipes.  That are almost uniformly bad.  How you age it depends completely on what you want to do.  If you are planning on doing a natural rind, then you will almost always want to keep the cheese at about room temperature (or a little below -- 16 C is perfect) for a couple of days.  This is to get the geotrichum started.  Yeasts are your defense against the dark arts... I mean blue mold.

A lot of time, people think that you can take a cheese and age it with a nice clean rind with nothing growing on it.  This is completely wrong.  You can't do that.  Something will always grow on cheese.  A very long story short: you want it to be yeast, basically.  So it will eventually have a white powdery mold growing on the outside.  If it starts to grow blue, then wash it with a 3% brine (3 grams of salt in 100 ml of water).  Once it has been growing white yeasts on the outside for a while, the acidity of the rind will be very low (the pH will be high).  If you wash it at that point, stinky red bacteria will grow on it (which is great for a washed rind, but not if you are not doing a stinky washed rind).  Your job is essentially to keep it mostly white until about 4-5 weeks in, where the rind can take care of itself.

Often Caciotta is eaten after about 3 weeks, so there really isn't that much that can go wrong in that time, so don't worry about it too much.  Try to keep the rind dry to the touch, but not so dry that it starts to go hard and change colour.  White is your friend.  Wipe out your box every single day.  Wash with only 3% brine.  Never wash with acid (like vinegar).  If you are at your wits end, then wash with white wine diluted to 5% alcohol.  There is much, much, much or to this, but those are the basics that have worked for me so far.

I would aim for 3 weeks.  If it is going well at that point, then you can stretch it to 5.

Thank You For the information!   It does seem to be doing better...  I cannot wait to try it. Of course, I dont now if it will actually taste like a Cacciotta but Im pretty sure it will be some sort of cheese.   

Yes, It will be cheese.  I made my first caciotta after another member posted on his make.  I was looking for a quick and simple cheese that was a little different from the other cheeses I was making at the time, and this was just the ticket.  After 3 weeks it was a very mild cheese that had some of the flavors of a romano but in a more delicate, immature, less salty form.  Very nice easy cheese to make and eat.

John

I forgot to update this...  I tried this awhile ago and it was awful.  Yikes!  I threw the whole thing out. It was edible, I guess but I did not like it at all.  I think I added too much rennet so it was a bit rubbery.  Maybe I didnt let it age enough...  I dunno.  Onward!

Sorry it didn't work out.  I wouldn't trust the egg method for testing salt saturation.  An egg will float in water when it's older due to the air that's gone inside of it.  Unless you own the chicken, hard to know the age of the egg.

I prefer always using saturated brines (easy to tell, because salt stops dissolving), and adjusting recipes to match, except for recipes that really require dry salting like bries or blues.