Puzzling chevre

I ran into a strange situation with some chevre I have been trying to make. Last weekend I visited my parents in Minnesota, where it is much, much easier to find goat's milk than Iowa. So I naturally stocked up and tried to make some chevre when I got home. All I got was a really thin yogurt-like substance that never really formed properly. Normally I would blame that on ultra-pasteurizing, but the box specifically stated that it wasn't ultra-pasteurized. So anyways, I saw a can of the dehydrated goat's milk at the grocery store yesterday and I thought what the heck, I have 4 more packets of chevre culture and no milk to use it on. So I re-hydrated the powder for about a half gallon worth of milk, brought it to temp, put the starter in and went to bed. This afternoon I checked it, and it had formed a beautiful curd. A quick 8 ours hanging in the sink later, and I have some really nice, creamy chevre.

So the point of this post is that somehow dehydrated goats milk out curded minimally pasteurized fresh goats milk. Go figure.

UP milk makes for a thicker set when making lactic and semi-lactic styles. The whey protein denatures and adsorbs on the casein, leading to a firmer gel. Similarly, adding additional casein in powdered form increases casein bonding, leading to a thicker set. It's like using powdered milk when making yogurt.

For your initial set, I suspect the culture + temp mix was not optimal, leading to strain selection that results in poor gellation properties.