Hi guys,
Sorry I haven’t been posting much, but life has been too busy lately.
I’ve been dealing with fiscal year end at work and it really has taken up every bit of time that I have.
I have probably another week of dealing with this and then things will hopefully get back to normal. I love my job but the month of February and the first few days in March are pretty close to hell.

Having said that, I did try to make a swiss cheese Sunday morning.
I was really excited about this cheese since I was going to try using the method of pressing under the whey, to get a proper texture for eye formation.
Well I still don’t know what happened but I ended up dumping 5 gallons of milk on the ground since I never got anything beyond a clam chowder consistancy in the milk.
In the three years that I’ve been making cheese, this has never happened to me.
I’ve had curd sets that I was not overly happy with, but never have I failed to make a cheese out of the set.
Well no matter how long I let this particular batch stand, it never changed consistancy. Yeah, it was pretty painful dumping this batch out, especially since I used the last of my P. Shermanii, in it.

Well even though it was painful, I did learn a lesson….
Never, attempt to make cheese when you are mentally and emotionally exhausted.
The first thing I did was to leave my milk sitting in front of a heat vent for 4 hours. I decided to move it there to help it warm up and completely forgot about it. The temp of the milk was only 80 degrees when I dumped it into the vat but the extended time at 80 degrees might have caused this problem to happen.
Also, when measuring out my cultures/additives I screwed up a couple of times…..
First I forgot to add my calcium chloride and ended up adding it at the same time I added my starter.
I also misread my recipe and added only a half tsp. of p. shermanii when it should have been 2-1/2 tsp. Once I realized my mistake the culture had already been in the milk for over 5 minutes of a 10 minute ripening period. I added the rest, but this also could have caused a problem.
These are the mistakes that I remember, but there could have been more. I was attempting to make this cheese while pretty much in a dream state so I don’t know why I expected good results.
The lesson learned:
Never try to make cheese when sleep deprived, emotionally exhausted and slightly hung-over.
I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to make cheese this weekend (racquetball tournament on Friday and Saturday) but next weekend I’ll do things much differently.
This really sucked and I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes.

Dave

%(()#@!! sounds a bit like the gouda i did and it didnt set, just the surface, left it out over night too warm. Would not have thrown it out, could have made ricotta with it

Dave I’m sorry, man.  I guess we’ve all had major fubar’s.  I recall one of mine.  I had my milk fresh from the dairy.  When I put it in the pot it was already at the perfect temp.  Added starter as usual and waited, waited, waited.  Nearly 2 hours later, with nothing but a slimy milk in the pot, I finally realized I had forgotten the rennet. 

I do see something else here:  when we get real familiar with the process, its easy to not rely so closely on the recipe steps.  Add fatigue and mental disorientation to that and voila!  Yeah, lots of reasons for your failure - but it still doesn’t make it any easier to handle. 

I feel for ya, dude.

yeah yeah, that’s happened a lot.

Once i forgot the milk on the heat source until it was about to boil, and i ended it up with half yogurt and half ricotta.
Other time I forgot the rennet and i ended up waiting and the pH dropped too low, so i made feta and blue.
Other time i forgot to add culture, so i made Halloumi ....

Honestly I shouldn’t have dumped the milk. As Neil said, I could have made Ricotta, at the very least, but man I was ticked. In fact ticked might not even be the word for it. Okay, if the truth be told I came very close to throwing a tantrum by the time I dumped the batch but it was at the end of a very stressful week so I have forgiven myself.

Rich is 100% right about one thing…..
Over the years I’ve gotten not only confident with my cheesemaking but maybe even a little bit “cocky”.
I was not paying close enough attention to the recipe and just assumed that I could do no wrong.
Well this was certainly a wakeup call for me. From now on I will be paying close attention to detail on every batch.

Thanks for the posts guys….I’ll let you know how the next batch goes (unless of course, it’s another failure).

Dave