P. candidum - culture from rind

[jedijon]

I know it's possible to re-culture your P. roquefortii (blue mold) from finished blue cheese.

What I'd like to know is if anyone has cultured, or has a link to information regarding same, the white mold from Brie/etc.?

I'd like to scrape off a few square inches of brie rind (or maybe the rind isn't any different from the interior...) and blend it with water - adding the slurry to the cheese / coating the outside.

Thus, I'd only need to maintain a few mesophillic cultures and a thermophillic culture and all the biologicals would be sustainably at my fingertips.

So, can useable white mold be obtained and reused from the finished product?

 

[jedijon]

Unfortunately, I'm updating my own thread. In case you can't tell - I'm a complete beginner w/cheese. In fact, I'm currently learning to milk the goat...meaning that making cultured dairy products is just the next logical step in the process.

The update goes thusly: I don't local access to cheese-making supplies. I've cobbled together a few things - but free or pay...there's nothing. That means I've got to either put in a web-order, or find some other way to get stuff. Preferrably for free. My initial question was whether I could culture while mold from an extant cheese. This is primarily as a way to cut the cost - Brie is delicious, but white mold spores are somewhere around $20 online.

I'll elaborate on my current small successes below, and eventually I'll be posting a final update in the next weeks or months with results. In the interim, here's what I've learned.

Experiment 1) I put a few grams of a commercial goat cheese in the incubator with a few hundred ml of milk. It took a while, HOWEVER, I successfully resurrected a bacterial culture from the finished product. It's pH of 4, set-up solid, and apparently just like the starters I've read about. So, although I have no prior personal experiece, that would appear to be my mesophilic culture taken care of. I don't know if it will work,or...should it appear to do so...how it would compare to a similar item that I could have bought. My gut feel is this is functionally identical to something I could have paid for--but didn't... I did some labwork and found aerobic activity on a commercially available agar plate (a petrifilm [by 3M]). Big surprise at this point, as the visual appearance and the pH tell me not only there's bacteria, but they're the right kinds.

Experiment 2) Using the same dilution as the above for goat cheese, Brie - when blended into sterile deionized water - showed equivalent aerobic bacterial activity. It was also plated on a mold growth media, that plate is 100% covered. On the petrifilm, it's a pretty blue looking mold. Sometime in the future, I'll both create a starter from a finished commercial Brie product as well as use a similar simple suspension to create a mold-containing wash.

Of course, ultimately ACTUAL CHEESES will be created from the resurrected/recaptured organisms to determine if this is a viable method. Be patient, that will take a while. And yes, this wouldn't be the first time I've had to go out and get an answer to my own question. It happens.

So, if you're a total cheapskate - or you're a homebrew-minded individual who thinks it's cool to cultivate that specialty strain right off the bottom of a bottle - or you just want to see how this all might have worked prior to the advent of modern manufacturing tech - maybe a glass of milk, a pinch of store-bought cheese, some heat, and a whatever happens attitude will work for you.

 

[corrales_305]

I know it's possible to re-culture your P. roquefortii (blue mold) from finished blue cheese.

What I'd like to know is if anyone has cultured, or has a link to information regarding same, the white mold from Brie/etc.?

I'd like to scrape off a few square inches of brie rind (or maybe the rind isn't any different from the interior...) and blend it with water - adding the slurry to the cheese / coating the outside.

Thus, I'd only need to maintain a few mesophillic cultures and a thermophillic culture and all the biologicals would be sustainably at my fingertips.

So, can useable white mold be obtained and reused from the finished product?

I was thinking the same thing. I'm new to the whole cheese thing, but it sounds like there has to be an easy was to make cultures from already made store bought cheese, unless they somehow kill all the spores and bacteria in the cheese before leaving the factory(It would not surprise me if they do some dumb **** like that) anyway if the bacteria is still alive there has to be some way of capturing it.. If you have found out how to do this easily and inexpensively I would love to know how to do it.

 

[jedijon]

Hard cheese probably won't let you recover any bacteria - the water activity [amt of available water, a good indicator of how friendly to micro growth, typically determined by moisture content + salt level] on them is fairly low.

New opportunistic mold spores have a good time, but the bacteria which created the acidic conditions for the protein coagulation as mostly MIA or super hard to get to grow again.

It's easy to get bacteria from soft cheeses. They don't add any chemical to kill the bacteria, they don't have to. And, they're not going to pasteurize the cheese...heating it up to 170 would have some predictable textural consequences you can try out in your own microwave...

HOWEVER, although I did make cheese - in fact I also made Brie [more on this in a moment] - there were some difficulties.

1) biggest issue, all my cheese had a very estery off taste. Esters are the kind of things you smell on fruit when it's very ripe. Think of a banana + a pear + an overripe cantaloupe + a mushy apricot + a bunch of sickly sweet sweaty sock smells...I did 8 or so cheese making sessions and they all ended up like this

2) I don't have a good "control", my reclaimed culture did the above smelling thing...but I made 3 thermophillic cheeses as well from store-bought yoghurt. All these cheeses were made from the same local fresh-from-that-day goat milk as my recaptured culture...so what's the problem isolating these results and comparing them to the recapture?? Mostly because I'm an idiot and didn't plan ahead. The first I made a crumbled into salad while my first mesophilic cheeses were still finishing. So, I didn't have any to taste later because i used it up right away. I don't THINK it had any estery taste. The second used a blend of both cultures...yup, weird taste. The third--I was getting my act together here and not using the reclaimed mesophillic culture--was supposed to be Mozz and it melted in the pot and became more of a tragedy than a mess.

3) So, was it the goat milk [or the bacteria therein] or my culture? I wanted to purchase a pack of store-bought culture and see if it got the funky taste but the goats are dried up...maybe next year. IF store-bought culture results in weird tasting cheese, then I'll have to find ways to eliminate it--my main method would be to pasteurize the milk first on the stove-top and then culture it. But DANG it was easy to make cheese - plop in spoonful of culture, set, stir rennet, cut & drain - press/age/wrap as needed.

4) Okay - that brie. So I inoculated a cut up chunk of brie into the cheese after blending. That was going okay in the fridge for aging but not great. So I sliced off a few little bits more of the rind from a finished cheese and put them on my new cheeses rind. Wait 2 weeks. = Brie. But that Brie funk + my fruity ester funk. Wow, very hard to eat. I DID put some on english muffins [pre-toasted] and baked them until the brie was bubbly and just browning. I desperately wanted to volatilize those esters. It mostly worked. The cheese was practically delicious.

In sum, my wife started complaining about the work to milk the goats, make the cheese...and get what we got...and after I'd had my chance to experiment and learn to make soft, hard, stretched, and rinded cheeses took its course...I had to agree

I'll get some bulk cow's milk from a local place this winter and try again - at least a 1 gallon batch with reclaimed bacteria and see if the esters remain.

 

[corrales_305]

its a lot of work making cheese and all the wait time is the worst of it. waiting all that time and then not getting the result that you expect is upsetting and discouraging. I thing I will just take your experiment into account and when I make my next cheeses buy the right cultures. The last thing I want is to buy 6-10 gal of milk, do the whole curd process, be waiting for a cheddar for 6 months and then find out it not what I thought it would be. I have been let down before while making beer and have had it smell/taste of esters...not good at all!! I know what you mean. plus then having to explain it to the wife why it did not turn out the way I promised ..no way!! Thank for the info I appreciate it.