The results are in

The cheeses have been tasted and overall the results were fairly good. In order of merit we have the Garlic and parsley cheese, the black pepper cheese and finally the plain cheese. Out of the five tasters, 80 % preferred the garlic variety with just one vote for the peppered cheese.

All the cheeses had a good firm texture and cut well, unfortunately the plain cheese (Golden Udder) had a slightly sour taste. I'm not really sure what could have caused this, maybe the temperature was slightly too high, I will look into it and post back. This sourness was not noticeable in the other cheeses, we will make up a new batch of starter culture and maybe try the next batch at a lower temperature.

The Tasters choice Award goes to Golden Garlic Udder

First set of cheeses

Here are the final cheeses, they have been turned 4 times over the last 24 hours and are ready to be stored in the fridge until we eat them. The official tasting ceremony is taking place tomorrow when we will see if we have created something beautiful or just pleasantly shaped blocks of mouldy salty milk. The cheeses are really quite small compared to the initial amount of curds, we finished with 415 g of cheese from 2.5 litres of milk.

The first three cheeses

All turned out well with the curds and whey, the first three cheeses have been produced and are standing for 24 hours to allow all the liquid whey to drain. In the picture above, left to right are Black Gold Udder (cow's milk with black pepper), Golden Udder (plain cow's milk) and Golden Garlic Udder (cow's milk with garlic and parsley). As soon as they are firm enough to hold we will be turning them. Below are a few pitures from the cheesemaking process.

Top to Bottom: Adding starter Culture to warmed milk, making the rennet solution, the finished curds and whey after 3 hours standing. The curd was scooped out into the moulds

Not quite curdy enough yet

The milk didn't seem to coagulate as we expected, it's been standing for around 3 hours, twice as long as it should have done. It does seem to be changing slowly, I think there may have been something wrong with the starter mixture. Mrs Cheese has just dipped a clean finger in and seems happy, so it look like we are moving on to the next step.

A few more hours

We will be making our first cheese today, the starter needs a few more hours until it is ready. We should leave it until it smells "sharp and clean" but I don't know how that smell differs from slightly off milk. Sadly we have had to dump the fermentation barrel as even after being sterilised 4 times, it smells like 2 year old beer and I don't want yeasty tasting cheese. Photos will be up in a few hours of the first cheese, so check back then!

Cheese Starter

The Starter solution has been made up, this is a mixture of the freeze dried starter culture and milk.

Step 1: Heat the milk to 90 degrees C and hold for ten minutes (or have Mrs Cheese do it).

Step 2: Rapidly cool the milk to 20 degrees and whisk in the culture, seal in a container and incubate for 24 hours at around 22 degrees. The culture will be ready tomorrow at around 1:30 and then we will make our first cheese 'Golden Udder'.

The Milk

Due to an unexpectedly long two and a half hour lunch and a bottle of wine each myself and Mrs Cheese have been unable to make the cheese starter today. I did manage to buy the milk - 3 litres of pasteurised Jersey milk from pure bred herds of Jersey cows. The starter will be made tomorrow which should mean the first of the cheese can be produced on Sunday.