Tomorrow I am going to post here a very helpful table which determine each parameter for each step in cheddar cheese making (pH, time, temp) it will be very useful

As promised , be late better than never

Thanks!!

Huh.

You mean you gotta be organized and procedural in this?

Making good cheese, is easy and not easy task…
There are couple of critical steps, like in cheddar, the draining pH is the most important, and temp along with agiation time.
if you did not take attention for the draining pH as example, u will end with high miniral loose from the cheese (as example)

when you follow (temp+time+pH+agiation) the result is balanced miniral, acid , moisture of course at the end: flavor.

I should mention, Nabil, that I can be a bit of a wise acre at times.

LOL

i am gona post here a nice email from my friend Peter, who was speaking about gouda cheese in cheese mailing list: (very intersting) read

Ideally any lactose left in the curds will be consumed by the still active bacteria in the curds, Atleast to the point where the pH reaches 4.6 or so ( this is where the acid present in the product starts inhibiting the bacterial action )

Ideally you want your cheese to end up with a pH around 5.25 12 hours after pressing.. This parameter can be controlled by adjusting the adjusting the amount of lactose left in the curds.. The key to doing this is replacing whey with warm water when cooking the curds.. In large scale cheese production ( wich I was involved in until recently ) you typically remove 30-60% of the whey and replace with water.. The lactose is dissolved in the whey and by replacing the whey with water you remove 30-60% of the lactose while keeping the total quantity constant..

Example:
100 kg of milk makes roughly 10 kg of cheese and 90 kg of whey..
Milk contains approx. 4.5% lactose
IOW your cheese vat contains 4.5 kg of lactose ( lactose content doesnt change notably for the pH drop you see before you start cooking )

Remove 60 kg of whey ( 2.7 kg lactose ) and add 60 kg of water
Lactose content is now 1.8%

Once you start pressing you remove 90 kg of whey ( 1.62 kg lactose )
Lactose content in the cheese is now 1.08%

When cooling the cheese it will lose another kg of whey ( 10.8 g )
Total lactose content in the 9 kg of cheese is now 169.2 g or 1.88%
Most of this will be consumed by the bacteria from the starter culture, but its hard to tell exactly how much without expensive lab equipment..

Thanks! for the info

I LOVE it when it came to science and numbers, even when old people made cheese as thier grand-perants did depending on taste , smell, sense and experince ....
i know old lady makes cheese (mozzerella) and she knew when it is ready for streching by the cheese smell (no pH meters no labs) .. nice world

Yup, they never had any meters in the last 2000 years that I recall, and made great cheese.

read the table i posted , it is very useful for pH reading when making traditional cheddar