Hi guys,
Sorry I haven’t been posting much, but life has been too busy lately.
I’ve been dealing with fiscal year end at work and it really has taken up every bit of time that I have.
I have probably another week of dealing with this and then things will hopefully get back to normal. I love my job but the month of February and the first few days in March are pretty close to hell.
Having said that, I did try to make a swiss cheese Sunday morning.
I was really excited about this cheese since I was going to try using the method of pressing under the whey, to get a proper texture for eye formation.
Well I still don’t know what happened but I ended up dumping 5 gallons of milk on the ground since I never got anything beyond a clam chowder consistancy in the milk.
In the three years that I’ve been making cheese, this has never happened to me.
I’ve had curd sets that I was not overly happy with, but never have I failed to make a cheese out of the set.
Well no matter how long I let this particular batch stand, it never changed consistancy. Yeah, it was pretty painful dumping this batch out, especially since I used the last of my P. Shermanii, in it.
Well even though it was painful, I did learn a lesson….
Never, attempt to make cheese when you are mentally and emotionally exhausted.
The first thing I did was to leave my milk sitting in front of a heat vent for 4 hours. I decided to move it there to help it warm up and completely forgot about it. The temp of the milk was only 80 degrees when I dumped it into the vat but the extended time at 80 degrees might have caused this problem to happen.
Also, when measuring out my cultures/additives I screwed up a couple of times…..
First I forgot to add my calcium chloride and ended up adding it at the same time I added my starter.
I also misread my recipe and added only a half tsp. of p. shermanii when it should have been 2-1/2 tsp. Once I realized my mistake the culture had already been in the milk for over 5 minutes of a 10 minute ripening period. I added the rest, but this also could have caused a problem.
These are the mistakes that I remember, but there could have been more. I was attempting to make this cheese while pretty much in a dream state so I don’t know why I expected good results.
The lesson learned:
Never try to make cheese when sleep deprived, emotionally exhausted and slightly hung-over.
I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to make cheese this weekend (racquetball tournament on Friday and Saturday) but next weekend I’ll do things much differently.
This really sucked and I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes.
Dave