Cheese Making

Day 2 of Camembert cheese making. Forgot to weigh them but I am making two wheels from a bit less than 2 gallons of whole milk. My pot couldn't hold a full 2 gallons.

I'm guessing around a pound each. Will get a bit lighter as it loses whey.....but it's pretty solid already.

Just an FYI.....for anyone who has a need to more precisely control a refrigerator like I am for cheese aging, or wine, here is what I've found out.

Even a wine cooler doesn't do particularly well at maintaining a tight spread of temps between it's compressor on and off cycles. I should point out though that the more stuff you have in the cooler (mass) the less fluctuation you will get....but I will not be stuffing mine full, so for me this is an accurate representation.

Solution? A $15 outlet controller. This is the one I have.



The next image shows the temp and humidity of the wine cooler out of the box. The set temp is 49F. You can see the fluctuations of temp and humidity for each compressor cycle.

Next I plugged it into the outlet controller set at 1 minute on, 10 minutes off. You can see how tight the conditions of the cooler are now. I haven't tweaked it yet to the temp I want as I have nothing in it at the moment (the wrong model was delivered so I will be getting the replacement next week).

Anyway, cool stuff, pun intended.

I considered whether the off/on would affect the life of the cooler, but the compressor already goes off and on, so hopefully, there isn't an issue with how I am doing this.

For something so cheap, it's much better than what comes with the expensive one cooler!

The tale of two cheeses.

So my aforementioned debut cheese making effort yielded two 18oz cheese wheels.

One seemed to be softening first, so I took it to Texas in an ice chest...cut it open on the 24th and more than half was just runny and useless....we ate the firmer bits on crustinis with fig jam and prosciutto. It was good.

Cheese folks said maybe I didn't drain it properly and that was the result, but that explanation doesn't jive as I just cut the second wheel and it's perfect!

See two photos below.

Cheddar waxing day.

It's addictive.....I'm making my second cheddar tomorrow....going for a 5-pounder this time.

Then maybe gouda

Cheddar out of the final press.

4lbs 4-7/8oz.

Not a pretty press, but the inside doesn't have holes.

Cut it because I will let one age longer and smoke the other half sooner. 3 days to dry, then waxing.