Ledger / About

About Curd & Rind

Curd & Rind is a working ledger of home cheesemaking, written down make by make in a kitchen and a converted refrigerator cave.

What this site is

Every record here is a cheese that was actually made. We write down the milk, the culture, the rennet in IMCU per litre, the set temperature in Celsius, the cut size in millimetres, the scald, the pH at draining, the salt, the press ladder, and the cave. Then we record what came out, including the batches that went wrong.

The point of writing the numbers down is that they are the only thing that transfers. 'Medium-firm curd' means nothing in a different kitchen; 6 mm at 34 C means the same thing everywhere.

How records are organised

Records are grouped into four families by how long they are held: fresh (0 to 7 days), soft ripened (1 to 4 weeks), semi-hard (2 to 6 months), and hard (6 to 24 months). The navigation belt at the top of every page is drawn to scale from the median aging time of each family, so the widths you see are the real proportions.

Within a family, records are ordered by age rather than by date. A Camembert at three weeks and a Gruyère at ten months are not the same kind of object and it helps to sort the site accordingly.

Fresh vs aged

Fresh cheeses are the ones where the make is almost the whole story — a mozzarella is decided in twenty minutes and eaten the same day. Aged cheeses are the opposite: the vat work matters, but the cave makes the final decision over months, and a small mistake in the press can take a year to become visible.

Both are recorded the same way here, because both fail for the same reasons: wrong acid at the wrong moment, wrong moisture, wrong salt.

This page was last updated on 2026-09-18. Questions about it go to [email protected].