Making Goat Cheese, advice?

I found a local supplier of fresh goats milk. I intend to contact them and make some goat cheese. Is there anything anyone would recommend I watch for or be extra concerned with in this process?

Old thread I know, but I recently made a simple goat cheese and thought I would put this in the same thread.

I made a direct acid set cheese using citric acid (lime juice) and it was delicious! The citric acid adds a nice flavor which compliments the goat milk taste.

Goat milk has a bit less fat than cow milk and Ive read the lipid structures are smaller. My goat milk cheese was very tasty, but a bit dry and crumbly. Curds were smaller that what I get w cow milk. To make a denser less dry/crumbly goat milk cheese Im planning to try adding some cream next time. Using cream rather than cow milk because I can use less volume and thus not dilute the goat milk taste as much.

Goat milk is wonderful. Its fatty acid components in particular distinguish it from sheep, cow's, buffalo milk. I love making chevre.

I believe your dryness and crumblyness is almost certainly due to too much acid in the cheese. I would not suggest "taming" with cream, but either pulling back on the lime juice or, my suggested way, is to do a simple cheese with culture - you're converting lactose to lactic acid, and that sets up your curd. Here's just one of my recipes, attached. If you have any questions, ask away.

And everyone could use a little buttercup idiocy in their lives:



As an alpine cheesemaker, I always told my goatherd friends there's no way I cold work with goats - I'd be laughing too much.

View attachment chevre 1-11-14.pdf

Curtis2010 said:

Old thread I know, but I recently made a simple goat cheese and thought I would put this in the same thread.


Goat milk has a bit less fat than cow milk and Ive read the lipid structures are smaller. My goat milk cheese was very tasty, but a bit dry and crumbly. Curds were smaller that what I get w cow milk. To make a denser less dry/crumbly goat milk cheese Im planning to try adding some cream next time. Using cream rather than cow milk because I can use less volume and thus not dilute the goat milk taste as much.

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Actually, the fat content of goat milk varies by breed and is highly influenced by diet and time into lactation. The curds are generally smaller than you would get with cow milk only due to the shorter chain proteins and fats in goats milk which makes it easier to digest.

For reference, whole milk from the store is standardized to 3.25% fat content and is based upon average for most breeds of dairy cows. Even then there is a range dependent upon the breed with Jersey cows giving as much as 5% butterfat. Holsteins, the other main dairy breed average around 3.7%.

For goats, the highest producing breed, Saanens generally have a butterfat content around 3%. Nigerian Dwarf goats can range up to 10% butterfat, but generally average around 7% to 8% butterfat. I raise LaManchas (the all-American breed) and my herd averages around 4.2% butterfat.

That's cool to know, Oginme. I'm familiar with cow breeds but only incidentally with goat breeds. And anything I once knew has been forgotten. I find both sheep's and goat's milk so interesting to work with not only because of the total fat content, but the specific fatty acid dominance in each animal that gives each cheese its unique abilities.

I worked intimately with Ayrshires, rotationally grazed. Excellent, small fat globules, "naturally homogenized" I used to call it - wonderful for cheesemaking.

The tarentaise, the last photo, is the breed most typical among the makers of the cheeses I focused on, alpine French cheeses. Abondance, tomme, reblochons.

To be honest, my wife is the cheese maker. I only breed, milk, shovel manure, make pens, play midwife, feed and water the goats. Oh, and occasionally eat the cheese. I've had some of the most incredible goat cheeses from some of the top cheese makers across the country (and also some of the most disgusting cheeses as well) with styles ranging from a delicately flavored Creme Fraiche to some heavenly aged Humboldt Fog. Alas, my wife sticks with mozzarella and paneer for the most part, though when she does do chevre, it is usually gone fast. I've offered my fermentation chambers during the summer for her to age cheeses, but she refuses to get into those styles.

The thing about using citric acid as the acidifier is that it does not produce any real complexity compared to the acidifying qualities of bacterial cultures. My choice with just about any cheese I make is to add a quarter to half a cup of home made kefir. The drop in pH is not nearly as fast as adding citric acid and I have far less control over what cultures develop in the milk before and after the curds form (and if the cheese is not aged- even after the cheese is produced) but the flavor is , in my opinion, matchless.

See I knew reviving an old thread might be worthwhile!

Lots of great info, from far more knowledgeable cheese makes than me, thanks guys!

👍

Gadjobrinus said:

Goat milk is wonderful. Its fatty acid components in particular distinguish it from sheep, cow's, buffalo milk. I love making chevre.

I believe your dryness and crumblyness is almost certainly due to too much acid in the cheese. I would not suggest "taming" with cream, but either pulling back on the lime juice or, my suggested way, is to do a simple cheese with culture - you're converting lactose to lactic acid, and that sets up your curd. Here's just one of my recipes, attached. If you have any questions, ask away.

And everyone could use a little buttercup idiocy in their lives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IuRzJRrRpQ

As an alpine cheesemaker, I always told my goatherd friends there's no way I cold work with goats - I'd be laughing too much.

Click to expand...

Too much citric acid is a likely issue. It was my first time to work with it so may have over done it a bit. Will try introducing more cautiously next time.

Good luck! Experimentation is what it's all about! If you're looking for a culture to work with, while I don't tend to like it in many other types, for these soft cheeses, I do love Flora Danica (it's the one used in the recipe I posted above).

Acid coagulation differs from rennet-induced coagulation in the way in which calcium, in the form of calcium phosphate, is freed. I have a cheese thread here where one of the photos shows me bending the cheese. This is common to alpine cheesemaking, where you do everything you can to preserve mineralization (calcium retention). Acid can make that difficult as it cleaves the calcium phosphate, makes it more soluble, and therefore you lose that "glue" that helps to hold globular casein micelles together. You end up with dry, crumbly cheese.

Now that Im living in the Chiriqui Highlands of Panama, Ive gotten more intetested in cheese making because there is a lot of dairy production here. I can readily get fresh raw cow and goat milk.

But, there is no culture of cheese making other than Queso Blanco. No cultured/aged cheeses. So, cultures are not available locally. Will have to import a few to work with.

Topographically, Alpine Cheeses would fit right in here...we live at 4,500' and other communities are higher...up to about 6,500.

View attachment 1505951261528.jpg

A simple pressed Queso Blanco I made recently, cow milk in this case, citric acid set, cilantro mixed in...nothing fancy, but its what I have to work with at the moment...still a step up from the typical local cheese.

The local Queso Blancos are not normally even pressed.

View attachment 1505951642075.jpg

Wow, beautiful, Curtis, both photos! That cheese looks wonderful. Was this one that was crumbly? That knit looks nice and the wheel looks delicious.

Understand on working with what you have. It was important to me to stay very close to the roots of this style, so I did serial fermentations (20), and a ton of rotten milk, to get the culture that eventually became my mother. I also researched and typed the grass, forb, legume species one finds high up in the Tarentaise (where "my" cheese comes from), and studied to see how well they'd do in very lowland Wisconsin. Our area is basically Normandy (in fact, I worked with more Normande cattle than anything else), and a natural fit for soft-ripened cheeses like Brie, camembert, etc. But I am just insane for gruyere-style cheeses, so wanted to take it as far as I could. It bore some good fruit.

I wish I could remember - this guy from S. America who lives in a clime that looks very much like yours. He was such a gifted cheesemaker. The interesting thing he said, IIRC, is that though he lives high up, it's quite arid, so he needed to go with a breed (and it kills me I can't remember) than can handle heat, and aridity. Definitely not my ayrshires, or tarentaise. So he was a careful husbandryman and really interesting guy. I can't seem to sign on but if you are able, we were both on cheeseforum.org. You might find some good stuff there.

Here's a couple pics of my cave, at its misty best:

The cheese above was not the dry goat milk cheese, it was a cow milk queso blanco that turned out quite nice.

The climate here is quite humid, clouds roll through town daily. Though we do have a dry & very windy period around November.

There is a German guy here who makes some wonderful artisinal cheeses he sells at market. I need to get to know him better and find out his sources etc. He is a very skilled cheese maker so would be a good guy to learn from.

Rather than always shipping in cultures, I would like to grow a local culture of my own. Ive done that already with sour dough. Any suggestions on information resources for doing this?

Curtis, the attached are a couple papers sketching the development of thermophilic culture using raw milk- basically buy yogurt and "ST" (streptococcus), inoculate, ferment out over numerous generations, and you now have well, sourdough cheese culture. Just wanted to post them for now because I know they are pretty sketchy. I'll be back later, I think it's admirable what you're doing and I wish I could think of the guy I mentioned above, cheesemaking in the S. American "Alps." I'll keep working on that as well...

View attachment WHEY CULTURE PLAN.pdf

View attachment alp - whey starters.pdf

Thanks. Will take a look.

Below is a pic of the original acid set goat milk cheese I made that turned out dry and crumbly (tasted great though). Will try again and be more conservative with the citric acid.

View attachment 1505996685466.jpg

Gadjobrinus said:

Curtis, the attached are a couple papers sketching the development of thermophilic culture using raw milk- basically buy yogurt and "ST" (streptococcus), inoculate, ferment out over numerous generations, and you now have well, sourdough cheese culture. Just wanted to post them for now because I know they are pretty sketchy. I'll be back later, I think it's admirable what you're doing and I wish I could think of the guy I mentioned above, cheesemaking in the S. American "Alps." I'll keep working on that as well...

Click to expand...

Unfortunately both links show as broken for me.

Curtis2010 said:

Unfortunately both links show as broken for me.

Click to expand...

That's strange - both are .pdf's, which come up for me. I'm sorry Curtis, I wish I knew more but I'm clueless as regards any web or computer stuff. Maybe someone else will try the link and let us know?

-edit, I'll just post their contents. I know this is a TON of stuff. I learned a lot from this guy of Swiss heritage, who was about as traditional as it gets. So I know a lot of this will read weird, because it was a conversation I shared with him. But I hope the two things are helpful in some way. If you have any questions, please fire away.

******
WHEY CULTURE PLAN

Until stabilized, use the thermo culture to make a raclette – or reblochon – or semi-soft tomme? - for quick turnaround. CURTIS: this is just a note to myself. I am trying to stabilize the culture by doing successive generations.

STERILIZATION paramount.

1 quart raw milk, 145/102 x 3 – strong ST; incubate at 102 x 24 hours.

1 tbsp of this in a quart of raw milk; 145/102 F only once. Alp uses 1 tbsp. Bought yogurt (I use Chobani – l. casei, l. lactis, l. bulgaricus, l. acidophilus, bifidus) in 1 liter of whey, and periodically “rejuvenates” the whey with storebought yogurt, for the lactobacilli. So, that's 1 tbsp yogurt/ 1 liter of whey (that's 1/3 tbsp or 1 tsp per 300 ml starter culture). (I will assume the same ratio of yogurt to ST culture, generated in Step 1 below), or Incubate x 24 hours.
-a strong mix of ST and some lactobacilli. Use THIS to mother culture the first batch.

Create and maintain whey culture and use it to build a few makes of raclette, or other “secondary” cheese. After the culture is fully stabilized, can go onto the main Abondance – drawn from pasture grasses only.

Step 1: 300 ml raw milk crash heated to 145, crash cooled to 102. X3. Add in 1 tsp Greek yogurt. Very important to get a strong start in ST, and also out-compete bad flora. So this triple heating selects for ST; the 1 tsp bougt yogurt starts this fresh culture process well. Incubate at 102 x 24 hours.

Step 2: ¼ cup of above yogurt/slurry into 1 pint raw milk, crash heat to 145, crash cool to 102F ONCE. Incubate at 102F x 24 hours.

Repeat Step 2 over 3-5 generations, taste and evaluate whether ready. Use as per normal dosing. Currently, for alpines, 1.2%, with .3% in bought culture for baseline consistency.

Step 3: Batch culture. If using for Abondance, crash heat one sterile jar of 300 ml. milk and 1 sterile jar of 700 ml. milk to 145; cool 300 down to 113, and 700 ml. to 93. Inoculate at 5%; 300 gets 15 ml., 700 gets 35 ml. Incubate at 113 and 93, respectively, 24 hours.

Step 4:
If using next day for Abondance, draw off 300 ml. batch whey in one sterile jar, 700 ml in another jar. Crash heat to 145, and twin-temp incubate milk and whey, per step 3.
If not using next day, proceed as in step 2, a one-temp incubation.

*****

"Alp" is a Swiss cheesemaker who knows his stuff. I got most of this from him.

Whey starters only work if you make cheese all the time. I don't trust them over long periods of time.

But you can produce a mother culture from the whey of a successful make to use for making future cheeses. What you do is incubate the whey to get a strong culture, than freeze it.

You can thaw out bits of it and use it to culture small amounts of milk, making yogurt to use as a starter culture.

Thus, you can pass along a culture, freezing whey each time you make cheese to use for next time.

The more you make the same cheese with a culture, the more you get a good bacterial blend suited to it. This is obviously more true if you use it each day. When using raw milk, your original starter may (and probably does) die out altogether, being replaced with more viable bacteria native to the milk of a similar strain (i.e. a different batch of wild Lactobacillus will replace the original lab culture)

These cultures are extremely resilient, able to adapt to any pathogens that try to invade them. The disadvantage is if it gets contaminated or dies or you mess it up, you're kind of screwed.

You can also make your own cultures if you have access to raw milk, it's not very hard at all. I will be experimenting with that a lot this spring to see what I can do to get a good culture that is native, rather than importing it from Switzerland (since my imported culture will die in a few generations anyway)

I don't think I've covered it, maybe I have

All cultures descend ultimately from the native bacteria present in the milk. Today we treat cultures like some semi-mystic thing, or on the other hand some ultra high scientific product, when they are neither. We wonder how they used to get them before modern laboratories, or else we think they had some great secret or some weird or gross way of getting them. But it's really very simple.

Basically, you heat treat raw milk to kill off undesirable bacteria and encourage the growth of the 'good guys'

For our Alpine cheese, this is a two stage process to isolate the streptococcus and then to develop Lactobacilli.

We heat treat the milk by flash heating it to 50 degrees C and flash cooling back down to I think 30 C. This sudden change and high temp is inhospitable to most bacteria, but streptococcus just love it. So if we do that 2 or 3 times, we pretty much isolate strep. If we do it once, we will still have some of the stronger lactobacilli

Then just let that milk incubate at 31 C overnight, and you will have strep-cultured milk.

That will be a perfectly fine thermo culture all by itself, but I like to add a second phase, where I get a stronger loctobacilli presence (because I want that flavor) so I use that culture to incubate some untreated raw milk, and let that work overnight to get a good yogurt-like substance. This, then, I use for my first culture.

That second step is probably only worth it if your cheese is going to age a very long time.

On the Alp, you wouldn't do it because you don't make your good long-aged cheeses first, you make Mutschli, and let those first few cheeses themselves develop the secondary culture.

Today, a lab produced culture is used. Mostly, this is for the sake of consistency. They have created a cooperative label, and so want to maintain consistency throughout the region.

It also removes risks of unsound practices leading to a contaminated starter culture.

I don't know how to isolate lactobacilli, but I don't really care to because the flavor profiles in them are pretty much them same. Helveticus and Bulgaricus I think are likely to be what you get, and that just depends on what's there when you start out. If I remeber right, Lactobacillus Lactis is actually a lactococcus...

On the Alp, we would flash heat and flash cool the whey and then add some store bought yogurt to it to get our lactobacilli. The alternative to that is to make your own yogurt instead. Other alps don't do that, I guess, and so don't have so strong a lb culture. I'm not sure how necessary it is, by the time the strep shuts down native lb and the small amount present in the culture (without added yogurt) should be able to multiply to similar levels anyway.

Remeber, the recipe for the cheese further goes to isolate and encourage desired bacteria. That's part of the reason for having very specific temperature targets, and specific time frames in certain parts of the process.

You flash heat the milk in a hot water bath, then immediately flash it back down with a cool water bath. this fast change just kills off most bacteria. If you do it 2 or 3 times, then you will pretty much isolate strep as it is about the only thing that will survive.

I have been told this is pretty much the process used in the lab to isolate these same cultures. The results are going to be pretty consistent as long as your are careful of your temperature targets, sterilization, etc.

Even in a lab, there is no magic tool you can stick in the milk and pull out the bacteria you want. You have to do something like this, put the milk under a series of treatments that will largely single out a certain bacteria over the others, or give it the competitive edge to defeat others.

To encourage lactobacilli, we need to lower the pH past the point where strep stops to multiply. This is why we incubate it for a day. But we need to be careful not to lower the pH too far, or the strep will die.

Conceivably you could do that on purpose, make a secondary culture where you push the pH too low for strep and kill it off, then let lb take over and you have a fairly isolated lb culture. Then you could recombine the two in measured amounts, etc. But this is just too complicated, the simpler system works and has worked for a long time.

Commercially, we need only do this once per year, after that we pass our culture via whey.

While there is such a thing as formal cheesemaking training, etc. It's not necessary in Switzerland. Pretty much, you only do it if you are going to work for some very large producer. Otherwise training is informal, father to son, etc.

In Central Switzerland, a lot of the Alpine cheese is made by German students who spend their summers in the Alps...

I just placed myself in the traditional system, learned from a master without any formal educational system over me.

If you know German, that's easy to do. Lot's of farms would be happy to show you how to make cheese in exchange for work. If you know French, I bet you could find similar things to the west.

OK, I was a bit off

We flash to 50 R (62.5 C, 145 C)
then IMMEDIATELY flash cool to 31 R (39 C, 102 F)

it is also important to incubate within the proper temperature range
the temperature should stay between 38 and 40 C (100-104 F)

This is the method we use on our whey every day,
just do this to raw milk and you will encourage strep growth.
It may take a day or two to get a viable culture.

I wouldn't hurt anything to do it 2 or 3 times. That would give you pretty much Streptococcus THermophilus all by itself. It is about the only thing that will survive that kind of treatment.

That is on the upper range of what strep will survive, and just about nothing else can.

I bet that if you do a serial treatment with a lower temperature, like 130 F or so, you would get a more diverse culture, but maybe in a bad way

We do that treatment to the whey to pretty well kill off anything that could be potentially harmful, and also to encourage or strep to be vigorous and strong. Since we are using whey taken from raw milk, it is going to have everything in it that was in the milk from the cow, in the air when we made the cheese, etc. So we want to put the whey under treatment a bit more severe than what the cheesemaking process itself does.

Our cheese we cook to 124 degrees F and hold it there for about 5 minutes. That will kill of most pathogens and most bacteria in general. But it leaves a few behind
the SUDDEN heat to 140 will kill a lot of bacteria off, but if we would leave it there for very long at all it would kill good things (strep and lactobacilli can protect themselves from heat for a short time) then the sudden cooling to incubating temperature wakes up the good guys and they get to work. SO we heat to 140, then IMMEDIATELY cool off, before the good guys die.

Lactobacilli WILL survive it if you do it once, but strep comes out the strong winner. But that's OK, we want strep to be strongest in our culture because it is the bacteria that makes the cheese. Lactobacilli kick in later, after strep has done its work, and add some extra flavor notes (spiciness and nuttiness) You don't really need to have very much lactobacilli at all.

Like I said earlier, I am not entirely convinced that adding yogurt to our whey really is necessary at all. (we add 1 tablespoon yogurt to 1 L whey, 1 liter whey is used for about 150 L milk, or about 1 quart in 40 US gallons. Precision is not very important with the culture, at least in an alpine cheese)

no, you incubate at 102. Think of it like making yogurt
If you incubate at 88, your will get some mesos growing, and ST won't grow al that fast. 102 is the ideal target for ST, 88 is at the bottom of its favorable range.

Don't use a portion of this treated milk to culture another sample, but incubate the treated milk overnight.
Basically, let it spoil, but since you've killed all the badguys off it will spoil favorably.

This sample SHOULD work as a direct starter for a batch of cheese, in the range of 3 to 10 dl per 100 l of milk (or that is, 3 to 10 ml per 10 l milk) (liquid measurements are the only place where I really think metric is good, it's pretty handy)

But, if the milk is not noticeably sour and thickened you may need to take your milk and use it to culture another batch of heat treated milk (a 2-day culture). If your milk gets overly soured, then ST will die so don't let that happen. That's why you should use the sample to inoculate a fresh round of milk rather than just letting it go longer. The acidity may jump up too high before there is enough ST.

Just cold tap water is fine for flash cooling, as long as it is a much larger quantity than what you are cooling. Since your target is 102


Also to be clear, the techniques used for thermo cheeses also result in a complex, undefined blend of bacteria. The technique ensures that your primary acidifying bacteria will thrive and be passed on, as well as your desirable flavoring bacteria. But there is a whole jumble of other thermos that come from the cow that survive as well.*

When we make our whey culture, first of all it comes usually from a cheese that has been heated to a high temperature. This helps to isolate certain bacteria.

But more important is how we treat the whey. As soon as the cheese is in the press, we take our whey and very quickly heat it up with a hot (boiling) water bath, and as soon as it reaches the right point immediately cool it off to incubating temperature and then put it in a thermos to incubate.

This treatment kills of most of the wild bacteria, and also by exposing the good bacteria to such extreme conditions, we make them stronger and more virulent. This ensures that when we put the culture in the next day's cheese, our good bacteria are very very strong and get to work right away, and that the bad bacteria in the culture are dead or weakened to the point that they can't compete.

By conditioning the whey like this, our bacteria are made so that they can kill off just about any competition.*

Also, when we pass on our culture we want to be as consistent in our cheesemaking as possible. The bacteria adapt to the procedures used, and also the procedures affect the balance. Any variation in procedure will change the balance of the bacteria and result in variations of flavor.

When passing along a whey culture, this needs to be used the next day, or if prepared differently it can be a 2-day culture instead. however, 2-day cultures are less safe and less controllable and today in Switzerland, farmers are discouraged from using them.

You can, however, take a bit of whey and freeze it, then use this to make a new mother culture. Use the whey as a culture to make yogurt, somewhere you can find I have a post here about whey cultures and how we do them.

You would need about 1 liter of whey culture (Sirtenkultur, in Switzerland) for every 100 to 150 liters of milk (precision with the culture is not that important, unlike rennet) or if you make yogurt, about 2 to 3 dl yogurt per 100 liter milk.

I'd like to show how our methods compare to the traditional methods, you might be interested in comparing them (like many things, the New World method of making Gruyere is quite a bit different)

Paul: Alp, I have a few gallons of raw in the cooler at 39F, want to use it to get at least a good mother, to inoculate a first batch and obtain whey, to truly do the whey process.*

I would like to avoid using all DVI cultures.* I've sort of pulled a hybrid of your technique, as well as Pav's.

I plan to:

(1) Flash heat 1 quart raw milk to 145, then down to 102F, 3 times through.* I presume now a very strong selection of hardy S. thermophilus.* Incubate at 102 for 24 (NOT 48 – see Alp's comment) hours.

(2) Of this, take a tbsp of this runny yogurt and inoculate another quart of raw milk.* This time, bring it up to 122 F - the temp of my batch make - and hold for 30 minutes.* Bring it down to 110-115F.* Inoculate at 110-115 to coagulation.* Presumably, you now have a good, complex mix of hardy ST and lactobacilli.

-or -

(2a) Take a tbsp of this runny yogurt and flash heat to 145/102F - do this only once.* Incubate at 102 x 24 hours.*

(3) Use this yogurt as a "mother culture," to do batch 1 of, in my case, 14 gallons raw milk, for a 12 lb. Abondance wheel.* *(Later, I will be doing 17.5 lb wheels).* Then proceed with your whey culture technique going forward.* This starter may be relatively unstable over a few makes, until the recipe process, consistently kept, optimizes the strains and blend of species.

ALP: I don't know if you should incubate that long, I'd be cautious to go past 24 hours
THe longer past 24 hours you go, the higher the risk of pathogens, and the more chance there is for unwanted bugs to pop up.

THe culture will be weak at first and somewhat unstable, that's one of the reasons why in the Alps the alp season starts off with a secondary cheese, for example Mutschli or Raclette. These won't age long, and so if the culture isn't right it is no problem. But after making a few batches, the culture will stabilize.

Every time you prepare something for inoculation, you should flash it up and down. We do this every day with our whey when we prepare the culture. I do it when I make yogurt too. This breaks some proteins which helps the ST to grow faster, and also will sterilize most milk born pathogens (but not always those that might come by contamination from the outside)

It will also ensure that your cultured bacteria are going to dominate.

You run into people who make raw yogurt without treating the milk having to restart their culture now and then, this is why. Over time your developed culture loses out and will fail.

If you won't be using the whey starter the next day, you will need to use it to make yogurt instead. Unless you use a 2-day starter, but I don't know the process for a 2-day starter.

Previously, I had made the starter milk batch and split it, using 1 part to incubate treated milk to single out strong ST and another batch in untreated milk to encourage LB, then combining the two in the ratio of 1 qt ST culture to 1 tbsp LB culture, and maintaining the yogurt culture on the side.

This spring, I'm going to experiment to not use it (or maybe, to buy live culture yogurt to use instead) because I'm not convinced I need to go to that much trouble.

VERY IMPORTANT that you sterilize everything that will contact your culture with boiling water IMMEDIATELY before use. Sterilization is important in cheesemaking. it's 100 times more important when you are making your own cultures.

Approach this with great caution, if you make your own cultures, and get careless, you will make poison.

Thanks.

No problem. I know that was a novel, but I hope something in there might be of interest, and useful.