Likesspace - 17 February 2009 11:38 PM
Tom, great to hear from you again. How was your holiday?
Also, thanks for the link.
When I emailed New England Cheese Making Supply, they recommended the exact same book. I think I’ll have to wait until my wife isn’t looking and get that one ordered.
If you could help me with something else, I would very much appreciate it..
Today I emailed Egon at Danlac and asked about his recipes (thanks to Neil for mentioning this).
He quickly responded by emailing me 5 different recipes that I had been looking for.
The only problem is that these recipes do not give target Ph readings but instead show the percentage of acidity at various steps.
For instance, my recipe for cheddar gives the final Ph at 5.3 - 5.4.
His recipe gives the final acidity at 0.675 - 0.685.
My question is if there is any correlation between Ph and % of acidity.
Please keep in mind that I earn my living managing others….I do NOT have a scientific mind and many of the technical articles I’ve looked at lose me in the first few sentences.
I really appreciate everyone’s posts/advice on this subject.
And I do agree that understanding the process of cheesemaking is very important to success.
Dave
Hi Dave. I’m still out and about…we are on Kauai for another 10 days or so. I am feeling a bit of cheese making withdrawal. I am hoping that the cheeses I left at home will be OK when I get back.
BTW, my first cheesemaking book was Making Artisan Cheese by Tim Smith that I mentioned in a previous post. It has a much more interesting (for me) selection of recipes than Ricki Carroll’s book, and some good ancillary information. I have since also acquired Ricki Carroll’s book because I think it is probably better as a beginner book and I have a lot of folks locally asking me to help them get started.
Getting to your pH vs. acidity question, it is not a simple one. The easiest way to think about it is that a total acidity measurement measures the total quantity of acid, expressed as equivalent grams/liter of lactic acid (because lactic acid should be the predominant acid when you are making cheese.) pH on the other hand is a measure of the strength of the acid. Different acids have different strength. For example, hydrochloric acid is a much stronger acid than lactic acid, so 1 gram/liter of hydrochloric acid would result in a much lower pH than 1 gram/liter of lactic acid. The total acidity would be the same. Hope that makes sense.
There is probably reasonable correlation between pH and acidity in cheesemaking, since the lactic acid will predonminate for cheeses where a lot of ripening takes place.
Getting to your question regarding the “final pH” or “final acidity” of your cheddar, it is important that you are talking about the same “final”. I have not made cheddar (yet), but it is my understanding from what I have read that the pH of 5.3-5.4 is associated with the completion of the cheddaring prior to milling the curds. Again, based on what I have read, the acidity at that time would be expected to be around 0.6. What you may not understand, is that the bacteria will contine to convert lactose during and after pressing, and the final pH of the cheddar will end up closer to 5.0 which I would expect to correspond to the higher acidity you refer to of 0.675 or so.
The pH change with a cheese like Camembert is even more striking, where it is molded at a pH of 6.2 or so but as the curds compress and the cheese is flipped the pH will drop below 5.0, maybe to the 4.6-4.8 range. This is important because the candidum needs a lower pH to proliferate. Washed rind cheeses need to be closer to 5.5 in order for B. linens to thrive. I dug a lot of this up when I was struggling to make an Epoisses like cheese. It is tricky because it starts with a lactic curd that is very acidic and the affinage has to get the pH up on the surface of the cheese for B linens to grow. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I think I am getting closer. I will know whether or not I have made progress when I see my latest attempts when I get home.
I have the American Farmstead Cheese book with me and I am reading it again on vacation. I think it is a great resource, and Amazon does have a deal on it now. They also have a combo deal on that book bundled with Ricki Carroll’s and Tim Smith’s. If you could manage it I would highly recommend that bundle. I have yet to find any cheese making book that is complete, but those three together contain a lot of information.