The Manchego recipe in Ricki’s book says to reduce the 1/2 inch cut curds to the size of grains of rice by stirring slowly with a wire whisk for 30 minutes.
I tried this. Within a couple minutes the curds were fragments the size of grains of sand. After half an hour they were no longer curds at all, and the result was a disaster when put into the press.

Tried it again after slowly whisking the curds for about 30 SECONDS. Much better results.

It might be the type of milk and its not coagulating enough. Are u sure its not Ultra pasteurized.

Pretty sure it wasn’t UP. I let it coagulate a bit past the clean break stage just to be sure.

For some reason you are not getting a firm enough set on your curd.  I suspect its just due to using store-bought, pasteurized, homogenized milk.  It’s hard to get a really good set with it.  If that is what you are using, are you also adding calcium chloride to the mix?  The CaCl will help somewhat in improving the quality of your make.  When I made Manchego with raw milk, it always took quite a long while to get to the proper consistency.  Then too, be sure you are stirring with the whisk and not whisking.  Along with getting to the right size curd, the 30 minutes is a part of the ripening process and shouldn’t be reduced by very much.

try using 2% milk and add cream (half/half or 18%, not whipping cream).

Welcome aboard Tellner

Thanks for the advice. It’s probably the milk. It’s not UP, but it is a different brand of P/H milk than I’ve used successfully in the past. I’ll try it again with CaCl. What sort of concentration would you recommend?
Increased the ripening and coagulation times to compensate for the decreased stirring (not whisking) times.

Welcome to this forum Tellner!
According to “Making Artisan Cheese” by Tim Smith, you use 1 milliliter of CalciumChloride per gallon. I don’t know how the solution itself is concentrated, since I buy it directly from a webshop.

I think that stirring constantly with a whip for 30 minutes will break down the curds a whole lot. I think stirring occasionally for 30 minutes would work better. I’m not much on the constantly stirring issue, I tend to wander off to do something else.

Personally, I took about 20 minutes to get the rice size pieces uniformly through the batch.  I use raw milk, and my curd is quite firm; so I had to work at breaking it up.