Salt: The use of salt is essential for making cheese as it controls the moisture content and, by that, the fungus and bacterial growth. It is used for all kinds of cheese, including fresh cheeses. The salt extracts the moisture out of the cheese. It helps to form hard curd removing the moisture from within. Also, protect the surface of the cheese during the ageing, simply limiting the growth of bacteria and fungi and helping form white rinds. It reduces the PH to drop lower than intended by decreasing the activity of the starter cultures. Thus it would be best if you did not salt a cheese that has not acidified yet. Also, it slows the ageing process so the cheese can be held long enough to develop the desired texture and enhance the flavour.
The best salt is that without iodine or additives and, when refined, is just ideal.
We usually need to add salt after trying everything posible to extract as much moisture as possible from the curds or in the beginning or during the ripening process. Most of the things we do during the cheesemaking are to take moisture out of the cheese. We add rennet, cutting curds, straining, and forming the cheese is all about extracting the moisture.
Then salt is added to remove the remaining moisture, which in most cases is almost the last stage of making cheese.
Sometimes the salt is added to the curds and then left to drain the whey. Other types of cheese are salted on the surface and flipped to allow the salt to extract as much as posible whey.
The surface salting frequently requires 2% salt measured from the weight of the cheese. Or in other words, 5L of milk will deliver 500 or 600 grams of cheese and will need one tablespoon (15 ml or 10 grams) of salt.
Brining of the cheese. Sometimes it is challenging to surface salting the large cheese, which must be repeated several times. For this reason, the commercial maker brines the cheese as they add the entire cheese into a brine. The brine is a liquid, usually whey from the cheese production that was heavily salted. To make a brine, you need to use a warm whey (or water) and add about 1,5 to 2kg salt to every 5L of whey(or water) or measured in another way 15 grams of salt per 1Kg of cheese. Then cool it down in the refrigerator or cheese cave. The soft cheeses are mostly placed for 4 hours in brine for every KG (500 grams of cheese - 2 hours in brine) 2 Kg of cheese might need 8 hours in brine. The harder chees types need to spend more time in brine per KG, which can be 6 to 8 hours per 1KG of cheese. The salt saturation always needs to be at least 80%.
Soft cheese like feta can be brined with weak brine, but the contact time is longer. However, the hard cheeses are removed from the brine to mature outside.
The brine must be kept in a cool, dry place, and the cheeses need to be flipped, mainly if they should stay a few days in there. A different brine must be used for different cheese types as some fungi are salt-loving(those that deliver blue colour on the blue cheese) and can grow in salt brine and transfer on a cheese that should be white.
Some brines can be made more saturated with salt or the salt can be 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%
Usually, the soft cheeses are salted as salt is mixed with curds. Some hard cheeses are salted before forming.
Other cheeses are surface salted - after draining and removing from the form, the salt is spread on the surface of the cheese. In most cases, this salting process is usually used for fresh soft cheeses as it is challenging to salt the harder cheese variants, although there are exceptions.
Internally salted cheeses use the same amount of salt as any other surface salted cheese - 2% per kg.