# Making Cheese



## nightskyfarm (Sep 7, 2009)

Good cheese comes from good, high quality milk first. You need to be sanitary with your milking, have clean equipment, clean area to milk in and chill your milk to below 40 degrees in under 2 hours. An ice bath for most does the trick. Get a thermometer for your fridge, you may be surprised to know the actual temp (needs to be 30 to 38 degrees.) Do not store milk on the door of your fridge, it is the warmest part. Do not agitate your milk, it puts air into the milk and with it bacteria and breaks down the molecules. Stir your milk if there is a need to mix the butterfat(BF) back in. High quality milk also comes from good management of your dairy animals. They need to be healthy, eat a consistent diet and have adequate turnout and shelter. Goats despise rain and wet. They can tolerate cold over anything, but not cold with wind. So, they need shelter out of the wind and with a non leaky roof. 

If your milk is clean and of the highest quality, it's hard to mess up your cheese. Your ingredients like culture and rennet need to be fresh. Your cultures are freeze dried and stored always in the freezer and your rennet should be liquid and stored in the fridge. Do not buy more than you can use, these things do go bad with age. When your cheese does not work out, it will be one of these reasons: culture or rennet is bad, temperature is too hot and killed the culture, bacteria of the bad sort and air born yeasts (your cheese making room needs to be clean), ambient room temperature too hot. You are mostly working with cold temperature cultures as a novice, so your work room needs to be around 72 degrees. Knowing that these are pretty much the only possible reasons for your cheese failure, you can rule them out one at a time. If you are making cheese for your own use only, buy small amounts of culture and rennet. Chevre only needs a couple of drops of rennet and a quarter tsp of culture or less. Feta requires a tsp of rennet per 4 gallon batch. Use clean muslin or sheeting to drain your chevre and I use plyban cloth from Hoeggers for my feta and pressed cheeses because the curd is larger and the plyban allows for better draining. Also the plyban is reusable.

All equipment used with cheese making should only be used for your cheese making. It should be Stainless Steel or food grade plastic. I use mostly SS, but I do use plastic bowls for mixing chevre. Have large enough bowls and pots and a very sturdy SS spoon for mixing chevre, chevre can bend your cheaper spoons. Some chevre I make I incorporate herbs or fruit and others I roll the logs in the herbs. It's your preference, but chevre out of the bags and chilled still needs to be mixed before you divide the batch into your portions.

Keep your chevre covered in the fridge while chilling. I vacuum seal my finished chevre and store it in the freezer. High moisture cheeses do well in the freezer if in air tight packaging. Thaw in the fridge. Air is your biggest enemy after bacteria. Keep a log book on your cheese making of what you did each batch until you find your cheese making is consistently resulting in the quality of cheese you want. Keep a book of batch dates on your cheeses especially when you get to begin to age cheese. You need it to keep things straight. 
Now, you have some information. There are a number of good books and threads here discussing the merits of each. Ask questions if you feel the need and you will get answers.


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## Dorit (Apr 20, 2011)

Great post, thanks.
Am still searching for that gourmet shop taste of chevre. I read the recipe for soft chevre you posted. Should I add Flora Dancia at the very end after it drains? Should I leave the cheese in fridge to ripen for a few days? Is MM100 meso culture? I looked everywhere for veal rennet and it looks like all anyone sells is vegetable rennet. Will that due? Is there a way to calibrate an analogue thermometer? my cheese thermometer doesn't register below 80 degrees. If I need to get a new thermometer what kind do you recommend? thanks


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## nightskyfarm (Sep 7, 2009)

ADD YOUR CULTURE AFTER THE MILK HAS COOLED FROM PASTEURIZING OR HEAT TREATING AND BEFORE DRAINING. MM100 and veal rennet can be found at www.dairyconnection.com you can buy a 2 oz bottle of veal rennet and that will last you quite some time (right now they are out of stock). http://www.dairyconnection.com/commerce/catalog.jsp?catId=2 You can also get the small culture packet. http://www.dairyconnection.com/commerce/catalog.jsp?catId=1 I, personally do not like the resulting curd from vegetable rennet so I do not use it. Cheese thermometers can also be purchased at dairyconnection, look on the equipment page. http://www.dairyconnection.com/commerce/catalog.jsp?catId=8

For rennet, you may try Hoegger or Caprine Supply, but it seems that there is aa shortage of veal rennet from the only supplier. I only just managed to get a pint from dairyconnection until the shipment comes in and they were thinking September. So, I hope it lasts me until then.


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## Dorit (Apr 20, 2011)

Thanks Jennifer.


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## nightskyfarm (Sep 7, 2009)

You're very welcome.


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## kuwaha (Aug 22, 2009)

if im going to make cheese right away do i have to chill the milk or can i just go ahead?


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## linuxboy (Oct 26, 2009)

Go ahead and use it straight after filtering. Saves you the heating step, too.


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