u/habilishn

we are finally in a good flow with our goats/milk/cheesemaking and slowly trying to advance :) my wife "stole" some camenbert culture as explained in an italian youtube video and it worked out perfectly! now we're wondering if there is a way to "steal" hard cheese culture (alpine, gruyere, appenzeller, but also parmeggiano or other "southerners") as well?! we couldn't find anything yet...

(if it works well with goat milk is another secondary question 😅)

does anyone know a way, have a resource for it?

or is there a certain hard cheese variety that is known for "stealing" the cultures working well?

I can't even come up with a good example. i don't mean richie hawtin vs. plastikman, because that is both in the world of techno, just with a certain nuance of different style (maybe).

what i am looking for is really unexpected harsh opposing examples that open up completely different facettes of a human personality with very differing musics.

would be thankful for some examples

https://www.shop-kaesereibedarf.de/Kaeseformen/Kaeseform-rund/Ohne-Boden/

Hello, we are hobby cheesers, we have our own goat raw milk (small quantities, only 3 milk giving goats at the moment). we learned a few basic cheese recipies but surely don't have a broad knowledge about cheesemaking in general.

from the old couple that taught us how to make cheese, we got 2 plastic cheese forms for pressing hard cheese, these forms were probably already years old when they gave them to us 8 years ago. now one of them broke and i am looking for a replacement.

the thing is, i am german, but living now in Turkey. Since it is always complicated to get any professional stuff in this country, i'm looking at a german shop (link in the beginning) to understand what is available at all.

since we are making small cheeses because we only have little milk, i was looking for the smallest "hard cheese forms" and noticed that forms with less than 10cm/ 3,9inch diameter are always called "form for soft cheese".

so my questions are these:

1. is it for some technical/biological reason not possible to make "hard cheese" in a form with less than 10cm diameter? for example, can it not ripen properly anymore?

2. in a somewhat professional shop, what is actually the difference between a hard cheese and a soft cheese form (except apparently the size)... is the hard cheese form more sturdy / thicker walls? are the drainage holes in a soft cheese form bigger?

could it be that my form broke, because it is actually a soft cheese form and i put it in the press with proper weight on it?

Additional question:

since i only find veeeeeery little and only somewhat different style (squared, no holes, no floor) cheese forms in turkish shops (and importing anything is very complicated) but my experience so far is that it is really easy and fairly cheap to go to a steel work shop and build custom stuff...

does anything speak against using stainless steel as a cheese press form?

Hey fellers,

we are milking three of our goats to make ourselfs some cheese and yogurt.

i gotta say first, the goats live together with some sheep (and a lifestock guard dog) on 16 Acres of very natural mediterranean hills, full of lean meadow, mixed trees (olives, wild pears, figs, oaks, pistaccio, others) and all kinds of shrubs, herbs and thorny bushes 24/7 free, so except some minerals available and a habdful of corn to lure them to the milking stand, they don't get any feed.

we believe that this natural feeding from an experimental point of view is so special, that we do not want to add any "acid starters" or cheese cultures to "color" our cheese, so we want to make "the pure thing" from our land, and whoever has done cheese, knows this approach is more risky, since not adding any (strong) cheese culture, can let wrong bacteria take over during the cheese making and then the cheese is bad. and we do have a slightly higher "good" cheeses outcome to the "bad" ones, maybe 65:35 🤣

okay, that being said, i was milking the goats 2 days ago, and the one goat's milk was smelling really weird. it had a stingy bad smell, but not like "old turned bad milk", more like if some weird wrong ingredient got into the milk. but it was fresh from the udder!! you could smell it right away when milking and from some distance, so it was strong. the milk looked perfectly white, not discolored, no streaks.

usually the milk smells perfectly pure, and absolutely not "goaty", just a clean pure soft milk smell.

so i had to discard that portion of milk.

next day, there was NONE of that smell in that same goat's milk.

anyone has an idea what this could be? and am i going correctly (without having a laboratory at home) that whenever i notice anything slightly weird like that in the milk, it's better to not use it for cheese?

Hi, first year that we and our goats are in a good "flow" :D after a rainy winter there is good food on the pasture, we have finally a milking stand on every pasture so yea, lets go!

we need a ripening fridge, since we have no basement room (or cave...) with good conditions. we are in Turkey, everything very expensive here (every electrical thing gets taxed additional 100%), professional cheese ripening fridge is out of reach, a 1,3m / 4ft tall wine fridge is 600€/$ and upwards, a (working) second hand fridge same size is 200€/$ minimum, cheapest "plug-in thermostat" from amazon is 100€/$, so for ~ 300, i could build a DIY cheese fridge. pros: cheapest solution.

pro for the wine fridge: looks better and has a glass door (therfore probably worse isolation so higher energy consumption?)

what are you all using?

(the cheese we want to ripen is plain raw milk hard cheese from our goats, no cultures involved. we did have acceptable, tasty results with ripening them for 2 months in a normal fridge with 7-8 C but we want to optimize.)