We took up making our own hard-to-find cheeses a few years ago, here in Australia, for home uses.
If you don’t mind, I’ll publish photos of our cheeses as we go. We make them with milk from the supermarket as we are city dwellers. Yet we get delicious results.
I’ll post photos as soon as I figure out how to post a photo, whether I can post it directly here, or if I have to use a picture hosting website. It varies from forum to forum.
Oh yes, I see how to do it… Now I only have to figure out how to reduce the size of the picture…
Glad to have you along. What kind of cheeses have you been making? It’s a shame you can’t find raw milk; I think you’d really be impressed with the difference in curd quality. And yes, we’d love to see your pics. You’re going to need to use a program like Gimp (it’s free) to resize your pics. The newest version of it has become quite complicated, but once you figure it out it will do anything you want.
You’re going to be coming into your Summer soon; is that going to affect your cheesemaking?
We have no choice. Yet it works really well. Supermarket milk only, but organic and pasteurised only. It is only with the organic goat milk that we find no milk other than pasteurised and homogenised. In this case, we use calcium chloride.
I’ll check that program Gimp, see what I can do. I’ll also try with Imageshack. It looks like the attachment size can’t be more than 300 KB or 640 x 640 pixels.
We have been making mostly soft cheeses (Camembert, goat, smelly washed rinds, and also pressed cheeses (Gouda, Saint-Paulin, cantal0, and blue cheeses, which is a bit more difficult (for the “coating” stage. No parmesan wheel, it takes too long to mature and it is not worth it for a small household.
No, the season change does not affect the cheese making so far.
As Rich mentioned GIMP is a great free program. Those pics are a bit small and you could resize them to 640 no problem, just play with the compression to make sure you don’t go over 300k
Yes Neil, I’ll do that.
I confess I am a bit clumsy with a few things such as resizing photos and the likes. For sure, kids beat me past the post fast and easy.
So you started making cheeses like us in 2007. Ha ha, funny!
LOve to all the team!:-)
Thanks for the shout-out, Mich. I’m on hiatus at the moment. My dairy-er (not derierre) is currently without milk, since her cow is calving. Hope to get back up and running in short order. My weeks are kind of empty now without making cheese twice a week. But there’s winterizing to do now.
Too bad, must be frustrating to wait for the supply to come again. You are too far from Australia, so you can’t just pop up to taste what I have in my cooler. Teleportation now! Computer, beam me up! ha ha ha!
By the way, I have an email friend, a French guy, in Argentina, who is making beautiful cheeses from scratch, by this I mean that -for sone reasons, over there, it’s difficult to import ferments…-that he creates ferments from cheeses he has bought and he re-cultures that in his milk batch. This is amazing.
He was doing mostly Tome cheeses, but now he learned how to do Camembert and St Maure also.
Yes, the waiting is starting to wear on me. I have 12 cheeses to make for people, and I’m running out of time. They want them for Christmas presents, and I may not have enough aging time.
If you are frustrated waiting for the next milk supply, you need therapy!
I suggest a secondary culinary passion. As for myself, I am into cold smoking, right now. We are having a terrific fun! Check on the web for my Aussie Smoke Bloke… Cute, is it?