Author
Monsieur Fromage
For my first year of cheesemaking I was a faith-based practitioner. I did things at the times the recipe said to do them, and I hoped. Sometimes the cheese was good. Sometimes it was not. The pattern of good and bad did not appear, to me, to be knowable.
Then I bought a pH meter, and the world stopped being magic.
This is a mild tragedy if you enjoy mystery, and a genuine relief if you enjoy cheese. For the cost of about three bottles of decent Burgundy you can replace superstition with a number, and nothing — I mean nothing — improves your cheese faster than that.
What the meter tells you that the clock doesn't
Time is a proxy for acidification. A bad one. Two makes in the same kitchen with the same cultures can finish acidifying twenty minutes apart because the milk that morning was a hair warmer, or the starter was a hair younger, or the phase of the moon was, you know, a consideration.
The pH meter tells you where the cheese actually is. A cheddar at pH 5.2 is a different animal from one at 5.0. The recipe doesn't care what time it is. It cares what the acid is doing.
The practicalities nobody tells you
- Get a spear probe, not a flat-tip. You want something you can push into curd or a finished wheel.
- Calibrate every session with fresh 7.0 and 4.0 buffer solutions. Drift is the most common source of "mystery" bad batches. I spent weeks blaming my rennet. It was the probe, the whole time, sulking.
- Store the probe in KCl storage solution, never water. This is the kind of thing you learn by destroying one (£45, not repeatable) before learning the correct answer.
- Rinse and blot between readings. Cheese is salty. So is the probe. It gets confused.
The philosophy
You are not becoming less of an artisan by buying a measuring instrument. You are becoming more of one. The best cheesemakers in the world — the ones whose cheeses you've paid stupid money for in speciality shops — are, to a person, fanatical measurers. They measure because the cheese rewards measurement. The romance is in the aging; the rigour is in the make.
The Cheesemaking 101 glossary has a short entry on what pH actually is, if you want the refresher. pH and Acidity in Cheesemaking is the long read.
Buy the meter. Your next cheese will thank you.