Cheesemaking and recipe scaling

Question

I made my first attempt at cheesemaking this past weekend, this cheese specifically, and it didn't work out - I got curds separated from the whey fine, but they never became stretchy.

I'm curious whether the issue was that I attempted to scale the recipe. I didn't want to make the full batch the first time - mostly because 2 gallons of milk would have filled my 8 quart pan, the largest I have - and so cut things in half, like I would for a bread or similar.

Is this possible in cheesemaking? Or do scales work differently? It's very possible I had other issues - I don't think I scaled perfectly in a few places, and I may have allowed the temperature to vary a bit more than I should have - but I want to nail down this one first.

Answer 1

Cheese recipes scale pretty linearly, at least until you get small enough that it's hard to measure out the rennet or culture accurately, or large enough that it's challenging to heat and cool the milk. I have, on occasion, made a 1 liter of milk batch when 6oz of cheese was all I needed.

Queso Oaxaca is a "mozzarella process" cheese, though, and getting the temperature and acidity right for good stretching is notoriously finicky. I've made mozzarella at least a dozen times and I still got a stretch failure on my last batch, for reasons I'm not completely sure of. If you weren't able to hold the temperature steady during stage 4, for example, the curd might not have become acidic, and would have stretched poorly.

So: your cheese failure is normal, and had little or nothing to do with changing the scale, unless you really did mismeasure.