I am making Montasio on Saturday. I start a new cheese by researching recipes first. I find that the Ricki Carrol recipe uses the 2 different cultures, but Caldwell and Mary Karlin only use thermophillic. Personally I don’t have much faith in the Mary Karlin book for a cheese recipe, but she has some good ideas about rubbing the cheese with different things. Her book has a honey rubbed Montasio and a chipotle rubbed version. I might try the honey version.

Which recipe do you use for Montasio, if you make it?

After reading 4 recipes in different books, I note that Ricki Carrol’s is the only version that is a washed curd.

I love comparing cheese recipes. It just always makes you wonder, which one is the real way that they make it in Italy?

I like looking a many recipes and then average them out as to what appeals to me. Also look the history of the cheese and see what they do
Good luck
(by the way have never made one)

I made a recipe from reading about the cheese itself, and then I kind of combined Peter Dixon and Caldwell’s recipe. I put on my facebook that I was making cheese and friends of mine wanted to come over. I ended up with 4 friends from high school in my kitchen Saturday morning, plus me. Four of us made cheese and the other woman just came to visit and sample the home made wine. We had a good time, but I need a bigger kitchen for that many people.

We made (2) 4 gallon cheeses and (2) 2 gallon cheeses. I look forward to trying them in 3 months.

Great ! hope it works well, best fun is experiment, then you can truly say its yours lol.

So, Tammy, did you end up using just thermo, or did you do a blend?  Personally, I like the taste of the blend, so I’ll stay with that.

I used the blend, because most of the recipes I read called for it. I just took it out of the cave and rubbed olive oil on it. I’ve never done that, but I’ve read posts from a lot of people who do that, so I figured I’d try it. I’m sure some Italian guy decided to rub olive oil on his cheese a long time ago, so it must be a realistic option.

I wonder if there’s an Italian guy who HASN’T rubbed olive oil on just about everything!  Anyway, you’re gonna love that cheese.

lol, its great on the body

olive oil used to be used to cover wine vessels in ancient Greece so to keep the wine from going off (no fridges), so basically olive oil blocks air.