Considering giving it another go....

A couple of years ago, I decided to try my hand and home cheese making. I made my own press, spent more than I should have on wax, molds, rennet and cultures, Ricki's book, etc, and even bought a small refrigerator which I governed to 55 degrees.

Over six months or so with the usual failures and learning bumps, I managed to make about 6 hard cheeses, mostly basic cheddars, waxed them, and aged them. At the end of six months, I pulled out my first hard cheese, took a big bite, and wow....it was the most terrible thing I had ever tasted. Some were incredibly dry, crumbly, and sour. Others were wet and had developed black mold under the wax. I was so upset with this considerable failure, that I boxed all of my stuff up and threw it in the attic. It would have all gone in the dumpster, except DW convinced me to keep it, though I would NEVER use it again.

Well, never lasts awhile and time heals all wounds. Wouldn't you know it, but the Mar/April Contryside Magazine came in the mail today with several pages on home cheese making. I'm considering giving it another go but I have one major concern:

Is it even worth trying to make hard cheese at home with pasturized, homogonized milk? I don't have any other sort availible to me. Without access to raw milk, I think I may be doomed from the beginning. I wasted a lot of milk and time just trying to figure out how to get a firm curd before, and never quite succeeded. The answer from the internet judges: Don't use store bought milk. I'd like to blame all of my troubles on the 'milk' available from the store, it feels so much better that way.

would you have any interest in trying to make soft cheeses first? That is usually recommended to try making them first. Hard cheeses seem to be difficult to make, the curing conditions are hard to maintain. You are trying to make a difficult product without any background in cheese making. It is a learned art. I would think you would be doomed to failure to try making hard cheeses first, before you learned the fundamentals of cheese making

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You know, you've got a couple problems. The first is that a lot of store milk has been heated to so high a temp that the proteins are too damaged to make a curd properly. And if you can't make a curd right, you're in big trouble already. (Although, the issues you mention of sour cheese and mold are technical ones you can fix through further education)

The other big issue is that store bought milk is far too expensive to work with! You end up paying 4 or 5 times as much for your homemade cheese as for store cheese, and in the beginning, it's not as good.

But don't feel too bad. The author of the book you used likes to pretend that cheesemaking is this easy thing, like baking a box cake---I suppose to sell more supplies. It's not easy, however, and takes either a lot of study and exxperimentation, or an apprenticeship with an established working cheesemaker, long term. Your experience is common and has nothing to do with you or your abilities. You just got sucker punched with insufficient info to succeed.