Well I’ve bit the bullet and gone ahead with another Swiss, thanks largely to Dave’s recent posts.  Actually I’m going to do an Emmental rathan than a traditional Swiss; but from what I hear they are quite similar.  I’ll keep you posted on this one, as I’m in the early stages of the batch.  Wish me providence.

Rich…
Good luck with the emmentaller…
I truly have a good time making this variety. Now if I could only turn out an example with the large eyes as found in commercial varieties.
Unfortunately this is not a cheese that many home makers attempt. Hopefully between those of us that do make this cheese we can work out the process to get this one “right”.
I’ll be looking forward to hearing of your results.

Dave

Wishing a very good luck !!

An update.  I have to leave for work this morning a couple hours before the 12 hour press is finished.  So I opted to turn the cheese and repress until I get home this afternoon.  I figure its better to press it a bit too long than a bit too little.  The wheel did look really good when I turned it.  As Dave suggested, no cloth on the final press.  It gave a really nice smooth surface all around.  But so far its been the easy part.  Ahead of me is the long, worrying process of seeing whether it swells or not.  For now, though, I’m content.

Are u maintaining the temp?

I could not maintain the 114 degree temp of the curd when it went into the press.  I had to settle for room temp.

Maybe investing in a small electric blanket and keeping it in plastic. Wonder what a batter warmer is at.

Rich,
Have you taken it out of the press yet? I’m looking forwward to seeing this wheel so hopefully you’ll be able to post a photo or two.
I hope you had good luck with it.
Oh, and I’ve always just pressed mine at room temp. As long as you got it into the mold quickly I don’t think you have anything to worry about.

Dave

Yeah, I got it in the press while it was still quite warm.  And yes, its out of the press and into the brine until 4:30 AM.  I would love to accommodate you with a pic, but I have been having a terrible time trying to resize pix to get them to fit into a posting.  Nothing I’ve tried has worked.  I’ve gotten with the Nikon tech support folks and nothing they tell me is working.  Maybe one of you folks can tell me how you do it.

BTW, the wheel is beautiful.

Okay, someone has to give you some help with this pic thing….
You can’t just tell us that the wheel is beautiful without posting a pic!
What I’ve used is a free photo editing program called Paint.net
I found it by googling and it is a pretty decent piece of editing software.
I really hope you can get this figured out so that you can put up a couple of shots of this cheese.
I’m really happy that you’ve turned out a good looking wheel.
Now if we didn’t have to wait for 2- 3 months, to see if our cheeses are a good as we think they might be!

Dave

get the free prog gimp from gimp.org then u ca resize.