Your family may be put off by the sound of raw milk; but if you cn get them to taste is, they will be sold.  They may become cheese snobs too!

And in regard to a freezer, it should be an upright, not a chest freezer.  Much easier to keep track of your wheels.

stellar cheese week, found a upright freezer on craigs list and a 4 gallon double boiler at the flea market. My wine fridge is now officially the rind drying area and the freezer my cheese cave and have ordered 4 gallons of raw milk for my first attempt at Jarlsburg this weekend, wish me luck.

Sounds great!  Using the wine fridge for drying is definitely the way to go.  I haven’t done a Jarlsburg; I’ll be interested to see how it goes for you. 

My raw milk supply has been non-existent for about three months.  My dairy lady had to dry off one of her cows due to disease, and the other wasn’t due to calf until this month.  Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll be back in business.  I’ve got some folks who want cheese for Christmas presents, so I need to get at it.

hopefully you’re raw milk will start back soon, I am lucky in that we live close to amish country, so there is an Amish Cooperative (you buy in as a herd share) where they roll the fee into the price of the milk, so the milk is expensive but I can get as much or as little as I want to order, plus freshly butchered meat and homegrown veggies when I want them.  I have been meaning to practice with some store bought milk, but the raw milk cheeses I have made have so far seemed to be doing good, I foodsaver them but they smelled good going in and so far non of my packages look wet or molded. I tried the trick of rubbing the last parm with pickling salt before I sealed it, so in a year I will compare it to the others to see if any difference. I just put up a Harvarti, so I will at least get to try it and a goat gouda I made pretty soon.

Christie,
I’m jealous.  I’d love to have an Amish coop near me.  We have a few Mennonites in the area, but they are more modern - they even buy store milk!

The salt rub is just about essential to prevent mold over the course of aging - especially a long age with a parm, or a sharp cheddar.  And I firmly believe that vacuum sealing is the way to go.  I’ve done about 400, and only had a couple that lost their seal.  Also, you don’t have to monitor the humidity either.

Love that Havarti!  It’s a great, mild cheese; and I get lots of people that want it, along with Gouda.

Have you been at it long enough to have tried some of your own?

Gouda is great, good luck, lucky to have raw milk, far superior to the store stuff.

Unfortunately no, my first cheese was made on 8/15/18, I wanted a hobby to keep me occupied when I couldn’t work in my garden and since my husband is a homebrewer we already had a few of the things I needed, I read that raw milk was the best for cheese so I joined the cooperative and my first cheeses were a goats milk gouda and a swiss. I made the Havarti about two weeks ago and I have a couple of Parms made, I figured on letting the GG and Hav ripen until at least November, I have the 200 cheeses book and I have been watching YouTube videos.  Still working on skills of tightening up temperature control, if I leave my smaller pot sitting over the double boiler when it is off the heat I have carry over heat, but when I pull the smaller pot completely off the steam it seems to cool down quicker than what the books/video’s say it should I am hoping that using the bigger double boiler will help with that, I have smaller than normal double sink so water bath was out.  Was glad to find this site, I have been reading some of the older posts to get ideas but I am still at the very newbie stage.
Christie

Practice makes perfect. It can be very intimidating, at least for me when I started. My Fav I made is still Swiss, I didn’t get holes, but the taste was their and it was better then the stuff in the locale store.

I am hoping for the best with the gouda, it was my first so I made a bunch of mistakes, didn’t realize that when the recipe said air dry that it literally meant room temp and I think I let the rind develop on the gouda way too much because the outside surface feels pretty hard but it is “squeezable” for lack of a better word so I hope that there is some real cheese and not just a wheel of rind, my husband loves goat cheese so after I try the Jarlsburg this weekend I promised that I would order some more goats milk and try to make feta.
Christie

Too bad about the small sink.  The water bath seems to me to be the best option.  The temps don’t change very fast.  Although one doesn’t have to maintain a perfect temp in order to get a good cheese.

You’re good on waiting until November to try your cheeses.  It is recommended that you age for at least 60 days when you use raw milk.  If you had one dairy source, and were really confident in their sanitation procedures you might fudge a bit; but with a co-op you can’t be real sure.

I’m pretty confident about the conditions on the farms, there are three that the milk comes from depending on where you live in comparison to their drop sites, the nice thing about living in a rural(ish) area is that everyone knows someone who knows someone. My vet takes care of the amish farmer’s animals and we see them all the time either at the vet or at the flea market, they are actually pretty friendly, plus the coordinators are very good about posting pictures of the barns and they inspect the areas that the cows are milked in and all the equipment used. Some of it is pretty ingenious, they use a car battery connected to a power inverter so that they can use plug in devices without breaking the rules. At least I have an off the grid connection if that fall of society ever happens.
Christie

I know what you mean.  It seems to be falling fast.