This morning was my first attempt at pressing under whey.  I was using Dave’s Gouda recipe and when I realized I needed to press under whey I was a bit taken aback, never having done this.  Well, I scrambled around and found a bowl lid that was about 1” less in diameter than my cheese pot and used it.  It worked pretty well, although I have no data to go on as it was, after all, my first attempt.

I’m assuming the reason for pressing under whey is to reduce the air, mechanical spaces, in the finished cheese.  Would this be right?  Now the question is:  which cheeses benefit from this process?  I know Swiss requires it, but what else?

Rich,

I’m not sure that I can truthfully answer any of your questions.
I know that Linuxboy seems to promote pressing under the whey for nearly every type of hard cheese.
Personally I do it on Gouda and Swiss but have not tried it on other types. It seems to work really well for Gouda but I still haven’t had the success I’m looking for with any type of swiss.

As for the large diameter follower, I did the following:
Found a large HDPE cutting board at Walmart. Cut it into a circle shape which was just slightly smaller than the diameter of my cheese pot, (I used a rotozip to cut it, but a jig saw should work just as well). Then I drilled several holes in the top of the follower so that the whey could rise above the follower once inserted into the pot.
All in all it was a cheap and easy solution that seems to work really well.

Dave

The easiest method to pressing under whey is to put all your curds into a tomme mold, put it back into the whey, and put a gallon of water or similar weight on top. That’s not enough for swiss, but enough for most everything else.

The reason I advocate a pre-press is to try and replicate commercial conditions at home. Here’s are some of the dynamics that large volumes undergo:

- For high temp cook cheeses like parmesan, the curds settle under whey and form a mass. Then they are lifted up and moved back and forth to help they whey escape, which forms a huge curd ball, one that has already bonded. It’s bonded to such an extent that for parm, you can cut the ball in half and each half will still stay together. It’s not easy to do this at home with smaller volumes because of thermal mass properties. Simply, a large curd ball will be hot and will continue to knit, whereas a small one will cool down rapidly.

- For meso continental cheeses like tommes, gouda, emmethaler and alpine meso derivatives, the process is much the same except the curd is usually left to settle under whey. If it’s not left to settle specifically, that happens naturally. When you cook in the vat and stir, at the end of the stir cycle, you drain the whey, and the curd is on the bottom. it settles and is pressed by all that whey and also the weight of the curd. End result is that the curds all start to stick together. So when you scoop the curds, they don’t come out as individual pieces, but as larger chunks. Again, thermal mass properties apply. For a 2-3-lb wheel, when you get those curds into the mold, they start cooling immediately. And this shocks the curd, changes the acidification profile and knit properties.

By pressing under whey I actually mean several different dynamics, that I unfortunately have used interchangeably (sorry):
- Settle under whey
- Settle under whey + press with hands to help knit
- Pack into molds and put molds back into whey or prepress a slab with a follower

The only cheeses that technically require the last treatment are swiss and derivatives where you need eye formation. The rest of the cheeses, you’re just trying to eliminate the mechanical openings without resorting to high PSI in the press. For most home cheesemakers, a 10 PSI on a tomme mold is impossible, at best they could do 3, maybe 4, and more like 1-2. So using some variation of pressing or settling under whey or pressing in the pot really helps with the knit.

Commercially, only swiss and derivatives (and a few specialty ones) are prepressed under whey for proper eye formation. But, commercially, you can crank up the PSI easily so it’s not an issue.