Chaource style soft cheese

The soft cheese I made last week is ripening nicely. The picture above shows the cheeses at one week. The picture below was taken a week and a half after production and it shows the bloomy rind developing. Here and there the rind got broken while turning the cheeses a few times. They had gotten stuck to the wooden boards. Now they sit on a wooden rack and the rinds are healing. I will look into getting some soft cheese draining mats.

Goat Tomme

a little goat Tomme after approximately three weeks

Washed Tomme

a cows milk Tomme with some mold above and washed below

Washed Goudas

Some washed Goudas on the lower shelf

Chaource style soft cheese

Last week I tried my hands at some soft ripened raw cows milk cheese. I picked up two gallons in addition to my regular ten gallon I usually get from the farmer. I added some starter culture, a pinch of Geotricum candidum and a little Penicillium candidum I warmed the milk to 24 degree Celsius (75 F). I added a few drops of rennet and let the milk sit.
After 24 hours I spooned the uncut curd into the molds and let hem drain. After another 24 hours I demolded the fragile cheeses carefully and set them on a draining mat for salting and air drying.

Gouda

Goudas with some mould


and washed

Gouda rind

Some more Gouda rind

Gouda rind development

In the previous post I discussed the result of the Goudas. This and some following posts contain some belated pictures of the rind development.
The picture below shows a cheese in various stages. The first two are of a one week old cheese followed by a picture of the same cheese a day later before washing. One can see the molds slowly developing on the rind.
The photographs thereafter show the cheese in various stages of development. Over time, different molds develop on the rind. For practical reasons I only washed the cheeses once a week. Hence the relatively heavy mold development.

Gouda with holes

Late July/ beginning August I made my first Goudas, shown above at about two months old. Underneath is a picture of the cut cheese at three months and it shows lots of holes. Now a Gouda might have a few holes, but this many holes is not typical. The taste, as well as the odor are not typical Gouda.
I suspect, and some professional cheese makers I consulted concur, that the milk I used contained gas forming bacteria. These organisms, called Clostridium tyrobutyricum, can be in the milk when cows are fed fermented food such as silage. As far as I know, the cows I got the milk from weren't fed this, they were out on pasture. The farmer does feed them some corn during milking time and most likely some of this might have been fermented.
Before cutting the cheese, I already had a suspicion that there might be holes in the cheese. The wheel in the picture above looks swollen which is a sign of gas formation.
Although these cheeses taste nothing like Gouda, they are rather tasteful. One cheese maker mentioned Tilsit as a comparable cheese. The cheese is sharp and pungent, it reminds myself of some trappist cheeses I have had.

Surface mould development on Tomme

Here are some pictures of some mould development on a cows milk tomme cheese.

Back in the Brooklyn Cheese Cave

The temperature in my cheese aging cave in Brooklyn has slowly gone down over the last few weeks. Recently it reached 55 F (12 C). Cool enough to move my cheese back in from upstate. It has become too cold and too dry there anyway.
So here they are. In the next few days, time allowing, I will post some more updates of which some are long overdue.

Aging Goat Cheese

Some goat cheeses in various stages of development.

Goat cheese

Six gallons of raw Alpine goat's milk


Look at that virgin white color. Goat milk is white because goats produce milk with the yellow beta-carotene converted to a colorless form of vitamin A.


Adding the rennet


Mixing the rennet


Dry-salting