Keeping up

Thinking of something to post here hasn't been difficult; however, posting everyday is much harder than I thought it would be.  Right now I'm only making cheese a couple days a week but on those days things get a little hectic.  Yesterday was one of those "make" days. 

My day starts with morning feedings, moving milk from the cooler to the vat and then pasteurizing the milk.  We don't always pasteurize milk but we are legally required to for any cheese we make that is sold younger than 60 days old.  So all our fresh cheeses (feta & chevre), as well as any young aged cheeses must be made from pasteurized milk.  While the milk is pasteurizing, this takes a couple hours, I pack any orders that are waiting. 

Yesterday I made one of our Spanish style cheeses that are still in development.  Our goal is to sell this cheese at 45 days so it would need to be pasteurized.  We are planning to age a few wheels of the early batches of this cheese to see how aging improves the flavor before we make final decisions on the long term plans for this cheese.  We may actually make some from raw milk and age them longer depending on the results. 

After pasteurization is complete and the milk is quickly cooled down to the right temperature I add my starter cultures and allow them to ripen the milk, waiting for just a small change in the pH before I rennet.  Once I add the rennet the milk begins to change, becoming a gelled consistency.  Once the gelled milk is at the right firmness it's time to cut it into curds.  The curds are then treated to a process of washing, heating and stirring until they are the right size and consistency, again I'm also looking for a certain pH here as well.

Once the curds are ready I pack the curds into cheese molds and begin the pressing process.   Yesterday my last flip and press of the cheeses came around 6:30pm and I was back out around 8:30pm to remove them from the press and molds.  All in all it was about a 14 hr. work day yesterday.   Not too bad, but hard to find time in there to post here.  I'm working on it though and hope that as our race to finish pre-winter tasks comes to a close I'll be able to take more time to write.