What is Reddit's opinion of Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking: The Ultimate Guide for Home-Scale and Market Producers?

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Another potential cheesemaker from the Island :-) There are a lot of people here that are from your neck of the woods (my parents live there too and my Dad makes cheese :-) ). As long as your intolerance allows some experimentation, then I think you can definitely figure it out eventually.

A sibling poster pointed out that Gianaclis Caldwell's recipe in her book is pretty good. They also sent me Mary Morris's (I think that's the right name..) recipe. I'll try to write it out for you as soon as I can. But to be honest, I recommend buying Caldwell's book: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Artisan-Cheesemaking-Home-Scale-Producers/dp/1603583327/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1630477235&refinements=p_27%3AGianaclis+Caldwell&s=books&sr=1-1

It's a bit pricey ($35 for the kindle version), but it has enough technical info to get you started. I'm trying think of a cheaper place to get the info, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

My favorite one is Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell, it goes well into the science aspects, explain well the processes and such, there are some troubleshooting exercises that help develop the knowledge of "what went wrong with my cheese" and so on.

It's great for everyone, from beginner to advanced.

So, most of what I'm about to say is coming from Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell. I'd highly recommend picking up a copy if you're interested in cheese chemistry.

I'm almost certainly going to get at least some aspect of this wrong, so i apologize in advance.

So, rennet is an enzyme that acts on casein micelles (essentially small "hairy" bubbles containing milk fat) by trimming the kappa-caseins (the hairy bits) off which makes them hydrophobic. Since the resulting molecules are now hydrophobic and milk is mostly water they'll tend to want to clump together in order to minimize the amount of water they're exposed to.

Assuming nothing disturbs the process (as happened in your case), these casein networks will also trap milk fat (good) and whey (ultimatley undesirable). When we cut the curd that's really just trying to maximize the surface area of the curd so that more whey can be squeezed out while trying to retain as much of the milk fat as we can. That's why different curd sizes are suggested for different cheeses. They're trying to cause whey to be expelled faster/slower. Larger curds mean slower whey expulsion because they have less surface area.

So, what most likely happened in your case is that none of the milk fat was captured in this casein network. You may have also lost some mineral content, since it would have been hard to hold on to anything fat soluble.

You may have noticed that the whey was a lot cloudier than usual. That would be all of the stuff you wanted to capture in your curds.

That’s a great one Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking: The Ultimate Guide for Home-Scale and Market Producers https://www.amazon.ae/dp/1603583327/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_VC1SATRDBB1KJBKCF10G

Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking

Oh damn. You have a lot of stuff. I would do something akin to a camembert or brie since you have P Candidum for the rind. Or a creamy Bleu with the Roquefort culture.

You can skim some of the cream off the top and make it into creme fraise and then make something called cream fraise brie.

I've got this book: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Artisan-Cheesemaking-Home-Scale-Producers/dp/1603583327

and this book: https://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Cheese-Making-Home-World-Class/dp/1607740087/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=FE9XYH23F30GN46DCRTP

...at home. Do you want me to try to pull some bloomy rind recipes for you? Shoot me a PM. I'll be home later and can look for you. I don't mind doing a bit of transcribing or I can just take a picture of a couple recipes and send em your way.

I liked The Art of Natural Cheese Making by David Asher. While the author can be a little political at times, I find his approach closer to making beer than other books. Another good one is Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell.

I should say that I've had mixed luck following Asher's methods. Some of my cheese have been great, but others disasters. I suspect that humidity control is more important and difficult than I thought. Asher lives on an island off of Vancouver, which probably makes humidity and temperature control a simpler prospect. In addition to some technical changes to temp and humidity, I'm going to try a different milk source to see if that was my issue.

Good luck!

Well, here's some scans from Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, which is a decent book, and you should buy it because I feel a bit bad about uploading pages from it, even if it's just one recipe.

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