[Cheese] Clean break/coagulation problem -- Warning -- Long Post

[Kit Anderson]

I am a total newbie ... but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Do you have a way to measure the pH? That would tell you if your culture 
worked. If you add citric acid or vinegar to the failed milk do you get 
a break? If you do, then the culture is the problem. If you don't, then 
the pH is too low.
Calcium chloride is added at the beginning to replace the calcium that 
was in the raw milk and is now unavailable thanks to homogenization. It 
has no effect on pH.
I use liquid rennet so miscibility and disolvability are not an issue for me
I assume you read Fankhauser's troubleshooting page?
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/clean_break/Problem_getting_a_clean_break.html
So far, I have made my best cheeses from Jack Schmidling's site. 
http://schmidling.com/cheese.htm

Kit

Derek Bradford wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've been lurking for a long time, but this is my first post.  It's
> long, and for that I apologize.  I want to be specific.  In a
> nutshell, I can't get a clean break; my milk won't coagulate.  I don't
> know if I should be adding calcium chloride, or if I'm just doing
> something else wrong entirely.  My recipes have all come from
> Fankhauser's pages.