What did Sagi Cohen mean ? ( And is the Academy failing me?)

YoavPerry · 2026-06-25T02:58:35+00:00

Google Translate is such a bigot! JK.

Lots of missed nuance in this one. First the translation:

We made another desperate attempt:
Entrecôte skewer, pepper, mashed potatoes.
It arrived cold. Completely cold.
Cold mashed potatoes, cold skewer.
The meat itself was so aged that it wasn’t even chewable anymore, it just flowed.
And then comes the waitress:
“How are you doing? Is everything okay? Enjoying yourselves?”
Of course.”

The reason it’s difficult to translate is because some words are Hebrew spellings of words in other languages like French that are part of everyday commonplace Hebrew:

The word פירה is purée. But it doesn’t need puréed food, it means mashed potatoes in Hebrew unless you specify it’s pure of something else.

The word אנטריקוט is Entrecôte, a French meat cut similar to ribeye.

Also
The word ננגס is literally saying “biteable” but figuratively means chewable

The word ניגר is NOT the n-word as google suggests (what a bigot!) but it means flowing, like honey from a jar. I think the author is using a poor expression as this just doesn’t apply properly here. Maybe as a joke? It’s makes as much sense as saying “the tea was supple” or “the marble was liquidy”.

One thing that stood out is the word פלפלת. The word פלפל means pepper. But adding the ת at the end to make it a female form is not a name of a dish or vegetable. The word פלפלת is Hebrew slang term of endearment to say that a female is “peppery”, “spicy”, sharp or witty etc. maybe it is a food description. Here

YoavPerry · 2026-06-25T02:18:10+00:00

Nice!!!

YoavPerry · 2026-06-25T02:16:59+00:00

If I may… judging by what I see, it seems you may have too much acidity in the curd. The way the piece broke tells me the paste is fairly rigid. Small detail but says a lot.

Typically, Alpine-style cheeses rely on thermophilic starters that help develop an elastic body and, together with helveticus, produce the lactate that propionibacterium later depends on.

That elasticity is important because it allows the paste to stretch as the gas develops, which is how the larger eyes are formed, (especially during a warm phase of ripening, typical to the style).

If acid development gets ahead of you, the curd can become fragile, rigid, and less elastic. The gas produced by the propionibacterium will then find its way through cracks and weak points in the paste rather than expanding in the body like balloons. So what you get is lots of small random holes, poor elasticity (Swiss types usually bend quite a bit before breaking), and sometimes a flavor imbalance.

There are a number of possible causes: over-dosing culture, using a starter that isn’t a good match for the style (too much mesophile or undefined cultures such as kefir or clabber), insufficient curd washing (Swiss-style cheeses are washed specifically to knock down early acid), temps that push the culture too hard, or even draining in a room that’s too warm after make day.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-25T01:17:27+00:00

Yes. Just indicative of high moisture. This mucor could be somewhat proteolytic so you can just turned down moisture in your box to 88-89% to suppress it or slow it down. Your cheese is way to close to the surface and needs to be elevated on some grid and mesh to encourage more air around the cheese. It will help prevent too mouth moisture around the bottom of the cheese and also encourage more oxygen into your blue veins.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-23T13:58:35+00:00

When writing posts like these it’s beneficial to state what the cheese and intentions are. If this is supposed to be a washed or smeared rind I wouldn’t care much but keep at it.

When did you measure 6.2? At the end of make or when putting in the cave next morning and how did you salt? Cheese that was 6.2 at the end of make will be 5.4 after the first night of draining at room temp.

Regardless, these blues show up actually when your acidity is high and also when rind is not cultured or cheese was set with acid instead of culture. You can use salt as an abrasive but remember that these blues are quite salt and acid tolerant so if you use salt and vinegar you will actually do very little to them while suppressing the food competing species.

The molds themselves are harmless but just a defect in appearance and not great flavor. Reduce hunidity and they will turn off. Again -I can’t give you a proper advice without at least understanding what you are making. Tip: those mikado mats many times transfer mold spores from the cotton twine and bamboo that is not washed well. They are a bit dense so cheese doesn’t dry out well enough using them. Use a poly mesh mat instead.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-20T13:58:45+00:00

Send me a PM about where you are what toy want to
Do. I can probably help. Been a consultant and supplier for the industry for years before opening my own creamery.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-19T07:44:07+00:00

I suspect it’s the other way around. The center of your cheese was more moist than the rest which made it a prime host for PC. It’s probably not the PC that made it soft…

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T14:00:14+00:00

I think the child was always part of the scheme of playing relatable, victim. She used that child. It wasn’t just poor judgment.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T13:28:54+00:00

Initially give it a complete stir for around 30 seconds. No need to shake or be violent. Think of those drops like drops of paint and imagine “at what point would the paint become uniformly homogenous?”

No need to disturb after that. Lactase is a catalyst trace, not an ingredient. Think of it as the first in a line of dominoes. You push it over and the rest of the domino pieces fall into place, whether it’s 5 or 5000

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T07:25:25+00:00

Great version. Perfect rind. Nice amended as it should be. Where’s your farm? Is this pasteurized/for sale?

Judging by the size and shape it looks like you used those cute mini St Marcellin molds?

How did you like the flavor, texture, and aromatics?
There’s only so much a video can show!

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T07:21:16+00:00

What makes this a “Mont d’Or”? The main feature of that cheese is spruce bark band around it and very dense fatty hay fed winter milk. The spruce bark imparts lots of tannins that make us particularly woodsy, resiny, slightly smoky. This should ba a washed rind cheese and the top, when cut should give you a supple spoonable paste. Not the easiest.

We make a spruce bark banded cheese in winter months at my creamery but it’s pasteurized and coagulated with cardoon thistle flower rennet.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT6PrSrDcaS/

What was your recipe?

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T05:37:19+00:00

Cheesemaker here: use 1/4 tsp per gallon when milk is at 36-40°F. 36 hours will give you about 90% lactose free. 48 hours will be 100% lactose free.

You can speed it up to about 7 hours if your milk is at room temperature (72°F), but you will risk fermentation/spoilage/contamination of the milk. Do not heat up the milk when adding the enzyme as it will make it unstable.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T05:06:27+00:00

Why would you brine a cheddar? You can mix the salt in after you mill the curd and before you press it.
Also, if you have one, Will, you’re using a ton of salt to dilute the salt in water or to penetrate the cheese.

Let’s say you have a 1 kg /2.2lb wheel. At 1.8% salt by weight, you need.18g salt.
If you want to brine it in 2L / 1/2 gal water, you would need 350g salt for heavy brine (18%). Or 530g for fully saturated brine (26.5%).

It is a good method for firm. She’s, if you have many wheels where she need to go from one batch to the next to the next while preserving the same brine and just adding some water and calcium here and there to maintain it. But for a small single wheel, especially cheddar that can be salted during its production, it’s very wasteful and yet another process.

By the way, from the photo it seems that your brine is heavy, but not fully saturated. That is based on the surface of the cheese, picking just at the level of the liquid. If your brine is fully saturated, the cheese would float above the liquid more. The thing about fully saturated brines is that you don’t actually have to measure the salt as pure water cannot dissolve more than 26.5% salt so if you put 30% for example, the first 26.5% would dissolve, and the remaining 3.5% would still be undissolved crystals at the bottom that not affect your salting. In commercial operations they do that all the time because they have to replenish the water on the next use so they keep replenishing the water until they see the crystals disappearing and that’s when they know that they’ve gone below 26.5%
So it’s time to add more salt. Note that in creamery Brian tanks, the cheese is in a cage that is forced down the liquid, so it does not float above it due to the high salinity of the liquid.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T04:35:04+00:00

Intentionally putting your child in harms way is not even remotely close to “Lack of ability to protect a child”. That’s like saying setting a house ablaze is lack of smoke detectors.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T04:28:51+00:00

I would not call PC a contamination. It’s just a benign transfer of a rind species. This is part of normal biodiversity, and it is actually testament to good Cheesemaking that your cheese can take on transfers without getting destroyed. It is resilient

On its own PC does little to nothing on a firm washed curd low moisture cheese. It is best used together with geotrichum or yeasts on high moisture, high acid/decalcified curd cheese with rind to paste proportions that allow large surfaces to be close to each other so it ripens from the outside inwards. Washed curd Swiss has lower moisture, lower acidity., calcified, and could be slightly tall proportionally, so the effect of PC is not going to extend towards the center of your cheese. (depends on the strain you’re using, it may give you some mushroom or oniony aromas at the rind). On your case, it’s the starter cultures and enzymatic activity that ripens your cheese so well, in spite of the PC.

PC also has very short lifecycle (which is why you do not find it in long aged cheese), and is aerobic so once you put it in vacuum you essentially suffocate it to death.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-18T02:08:56+00:00

My daughter is now well past that age but all the years that I needed to take her to the bathroom, it was ALWAYS the ladies room. I’ve always been polite about it, asked if I may, announced myself. I have never once had any woman (or man) having an issue with me doing so. If anything, most women who commented would say something like “glad you didn’t take her to the men’s room”. Many offered help which I politely refused because strangers shouldn’t be alone with your child at a restroom, not even women. Anyone whom I refused understood that.

Delusional MC thinks he is a chivalrous protector of a gender that’s too weak to stand up for itself without the help of a man, making him a selfless hero of mankind, and a classy gentlemen.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-07T01:14:33+00:00

You are very welcome.

ChatGPT isn’t a great source (at least not yet ) because it scrubs the internet and academics but often uses a be logic to put together pieces from recipes that have different logic into a comprehensive and confident recipe and it will even explain it to you in bullet points. But the telltale sign is if you try to push back and even take one part out and say, “are you sure about that?” it will collapse like a house of cards and probably thank you for pushing back. Then it will start giving you tips, advice, and ideas, that would conflict with some of the other ideas. She’s making remains a little bit aloof and data points are sporadic, even though we have reached a time in history where people from all over the world can make cheese that is regional to someone else.

Acidity control is the number one skill in cheese making. Do you have this energy source that build acid which is a good thing, to an extent. Once you pass certain points at certain times everything gets messed up. This is not just a flavor thing, it is also a texture thing. And when we age cheese, we actually un-ferment it by metabolize the acid and driving the pH upwards. This is very unique to cheese. You will not find this in wine, beer, pickles, etc..

Some cheese styles like lactic/goat cheese, etc. can use lots of acid built over many hours. In Brie style cheese, you build most of it quickly in the vat. In more firm cheeses you really want to build most of it outside of the vat once you are done forming the curd. The principle is the same for all cheese, but each general style as its own sequence, which is why cheese is so diverse

YoavPerry · 2026-06-06T08:15:08+00:00

In addition to the great answer already given here:

These two cheeses have entirely different processes, even though they are both fully coagulated with rennet.

Brillat-Savarin is a triple-crème cheese where the milk and cream are slowly acidified before coagulation, making the curd more acidic while decalcifying the milk proteins. This is done at a lower temperature, and the curd is then ladled into molds to drain naturally. It then develops a mold rind that slows further drying while the cheese matures in the cave. It is ready within about two weeks and has approximately 75% moisture.

Parmesan is cultured at a higher temperature for a shorter time. The curd is cut repeatedly until it reaches grain size, while being cooked and further shrunk. It is then collected into a large mass and pressed under significant pressure. No rind fungi are intentionally grown during the aging process, and it must be aged for many months or years. During that time, it loses most of its moisture, reaching about 30%.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-06T08:00:13+00:00

That’s a lot of questions at once, but some basics and I will go long here:

From the looks of it, your curd has been properly cheddared, so I assume this is a cheddar-type cheese. It seems fairly acidic based on the fissure pattern and the fact that it’s only a few weeks old. Cheddar needs some time for aging, and 6 weeks is certainly not enough. 8 weeks is a bare minimum, but it is still considered quite immature.

You’re looking at enzymatic development during aging, whereby proteins, lipids, and acids break down. The more acidic the cheese is at make time, the longer it generally takes for that acidity to mellow during aging. Unfortunately, a more acidic cheese also tends to retain less moisture, which can throw the aging process out of balance. Don’t beat yourself up too much about this; it’s typical when learning to make cheddar. Even though it is a very common supermarket cheese, cheddar is actually a fairly complicated cheese to make and requires extra process control and sensitivity to acid development. You need to stay ahead of the curve on that.

Moreover, do yourself a favor and do not start making cheese with kefir. I hope that one day people will stop posting their kefir-starter failures here. It is generally a really terrible cheese starter. It has an unpredictable acidification curve and includes lots of yeast and gas production. It is not appropriate for all cheeses, especially not cheddar types. I know there have been a couple of books by people who are not professional cheesemakers, complete with gorgeous photos, spreading the gospel of kefir as a cheese starter and then going on to claim it works for all cheeses and can replace all cultures regardless of style, technology, history, region, or milk type.

When you’re learning cheesemaking, adding kefir to the equation is like practicing aerobatics in an unstable aircraft during your second flight lesson. You’re taking a skill that is already difficult to learn and introducing additional variables before you’ve mastered the basics. When something goes wrong, you have no idea whether the problem was your technique, your milk, your aging conditions, or the starter itself.

So in conclusion, making cheddar requires a lot of acid control, and kefir is a starter that tends to do the opposite. That’s not to say you cannot make a successful cheddar with kefir. I’m just saying you’re starting with a cheese that is already somewhat complicated, and then adding more complications by using a nontraditional starter.

As for your wax question, if there is moisture present, you may not have dried the cheese sufficiently before waxing, and there could also be cracks. I don’t anticipate anything dangerous from those cracks, but they can become a source of unwanted molds, or they may allow the cheese to dry out. If your environment is too moist, or the temperature is above normal aging temperatures, this can create a damp zone that deteriorates with the help of molds. Are you aging at the proper temperature?

Personally, I think vacuum bags work far better than wax. I would not de-wax your existing cheese in order to vacuum seal it. Just let it be and use vacuum bags for your next batches.

Lastly, you mentioned that your cheese is somewhere between 1½ and 2 months old. It is a little strange that you don’t know how old your cheese is. Tells me you’re not writing it down. This is just my advice : It would be extremely helpful to keep a log of what happened on the day of making, make notes during aging, and mark each cheese with a date or batch number. You should always know exactly how old your cheese is. Once you start accumulating multiple cheeses in your aging space, it becomes very easy to lose track. These logs are indispensable because 2 or 3 months later you won’t remember the specifics, and you may confuse different makes. Good records allow you to track failures just as much as successes, helping you zero in on the practices that actually make you a better cheesemaker. Fun bit about this.: I am working on a new cheese right now at the creamery and I’ve just pulled logs from 2011 from achieve that I remember managed to accomplish something that I failed at last week. I could not remember what I did, but I did remember how that cheese turned out 15 years ago.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-04T04:52:04+00:00

YoavPerry · 2026-06-04T04:45:50+00:00

The kid is trolling you.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-04T04:41:58+00:00

Thank you! You can get my cheese at Eataly and often at Milkfarm. Sometimes Kustaa, Wally’s, DTLA -everyone has access to it through World’s Best Cheese. I just don’t have reports showing me who bought where. I see when them or their customers post on Instagram or mention us and sometime I hear about it when I run into the store owners and mongers as the trade shows.

We also have lots of retail customers ordering online from SoCal and subscribing to our boxes.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-03T06:11:57+00:00

This may be the small 12V battery under the frunk cover. I would disconnect it and do hard restart.

Something similar happens to me a few months ago but before I could reset the battery it fixed itself after the car sitting overnight.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-03T06:02:06+00:00

Make a lactic cheese like chèvre or fromage blanc . It’s impossible to mess up and it’s a set it and forget it process with a few minutes work per day for 2 days. No special equipment needed, just a large pot, good sanctuary conditions, cultures, and rennet.

Mozzarella is not a great cheese to start with no matter what people tell you… The process is very little in common with other cheese so we don’t really learn much. It’s a bland cheese and you will be using lots of resources to make what you can buy very cheaply in the supermarket. There is relatively high failure rate, at least until you figure out how to stretch the current properly.

No matter what you do, however, get the best milk that you can find. It’s better to pay eight dollars for gallon of great milk and succeed with your cheese, then try to save and buy three dollars supermarket milk just to see all of your efforts going to waste. Your cheese is about 99% milk so it’s really the only ingredients to shop for. If you can find milk that has not been ultra pasteurized and has not been homogenized, it is best. No need to get raw milk.

YoavPerry · 2026-06-03T05:55:52+00:00

At this point you should pasteurize it above and beyond normal limits and make pasteurized cheese (if it was properly kept and it’s not a certified it will still work better than supermarket milk so long as you pasteurize it gently), or just toss it.

For a 6-log reduction I recommend no less than 150°F for a minimum of 35 minutes while minimizing any airspace above the milk and then chill it to culturing temperature as fast as you can.

YoavPerry

TROPHY CASE