[Cheese] Molds (sorry, long post)

[dean crabtree]

  Brian <mavityre at comcast.net> wrote:  Does anybody know where I can get bigger molds? Say for 5 to 10 lbs wheels 

   
  Here's my odd way of doing it:
   
  I wanted a mold for doing some larger wheels, and I found a place out of Oklahoma that makes stainless cheese stuff.  I asked for a quote on a three piece "mini-Daisy" mold which I think was 9 or 10 inches in diameter.
   
  I got the quote and after I got my heart beating again (this is afterall a hobby for me and not a profession) I was thinking that I could find some decent things to make a hoop with, but I had trouble finding something that would work well as a follower.
   
  My work is "sort of" in the realm of metals, and my second thought was to get some stainless tubing in whatever diameter I wanted, but the thing about buying raw stock, is that you must buy a whole "stick" of it just like if you've buying lumber.  I don't forsee needing a total of 12 feet of tubing.
   
  So then I thought maybe my local restaurant supply house might have something if I looked hard enough.  I was thinking maybe some of those steamtable inserts for holding soup, or something like that.  I'd just drill and deburr some holes in the bottom of one, and use another as a follower (they do nest, but have very steep drafts).
   
  The cost was again too great for my thinking, as I am so tight I hum in a breeze.  I thought about food grade plastic food containers.  I already have a giant tub and lid that I use for brining fowl or meats, and as a crock for making kraut.  I went over to the food containers.  The polycarbonite containers are about 3x the price of the polypro ones.  The walls were thick, but I wasn't sure if the plastic could withstand a 50 pound pressing, but it was so cheap that I thought I'd give it a go.  I didn't get the larger size, but thought I would prove the process with a setup that would make a three or four pound cheese.  I got two with an inside bottom diameter of about 6-1/2 inches.  I know that's not much larger than what I could get with PVC, but my goal are some 12" parm wheels and I wanted to see if this idea would work.
   
  On one container, I drilled and deburred holes in the bottom and some in the sides, because so many pictures of hoops have holes in the sides.  I now see no benefit of holes in the sides, because no great amount of whey was discharged through them, and they just wanted to hold onto the curds too much.  My thinking was that if the bottom holes didn't easily discharge enough whey that I could then simply cut the bottom off, but I couldn't do it the other way around.
   
  I tried it out on a stirred curd cheddar and it works fine.  Because it is a bit deep relative to the diameter, it made loading and working a butter muslin cheesecloth a bit cumbersome for the inital pressings, and left some bunched-cloth creases in the cheese.  After it held together enough I did the flipping upside down.  That is to say, I put the unaltered "follower" upside down, and draped a sterile handkerchief over the bottom of the follower, put the flipped cheese on it and another sterile handkerchief over the cheese and then the drilled "hoop" on that.  After it was all fit back together, the whole shebang was flipped back over and put into my press.  (My press is like the primitive free weight design that is on the Fiasco Farms website.)  The thinner hankie didn't force creases into the cheese and it smoothed out from twenty pounds on, and it looked like a wonderful wheel.
   
  If you did it like this, you could get some for a  8 - 10 pound cheese for about fifteen bucks.  
   
  Sorry it takes me so long to get to the point, but I hope this helps.
   
  Dean C.

		
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