About CurdCraft

Home cheesemaking runs on a handful of numbers that are easy to get wrong by hand: how much cheese a batch of milk will actually make, how much rennet a given volume needs, how a recipe’s culture amount scales to your pot instead of the recipe writer’s, what a titration reading actually means, and how much salt belongs in a brine of a given strength. None of these calculations are hard on their own, but getting one wrong can turn a morning of work into a batch that never quite sets, ages properly, or tastes the way it should. CurdCraft exists to put the real arithmetic in front of you before the milk hits the pot.

Rather than long articles you have to read end to end, the site is built around a handful of small, single-purpose calculators, each aimed at one decision in the process. The Milk-to-Cheese Yield Calculatoruses the classic Van Slyke formula to estimate how much cheese your milk’s fat and protein will yield at a given target moisture. The Rennet Dosage Calculatorturns the strength ratio printed on your rennet’s label into an exact dose and a suggested dilution. The Culture Ratio Calculatorscales a recipe’s starter culture amount to whatever batch size you’re actually working with. The Cheese Aging Time & Humidity Guide estimates the weight a cheese will lose as it dries in the cave and gives typical cave conditions by category. The pH & Acidity Calculator converts a titration reading into % titratable acidity and Dornic degrees against typical targets for each stage of a make. And the Brine Salt Ratio Calculator works out exactly how much salt to dissolve for a target brine strength, with the equivalent salometer reading.

Beyond the calculators, the blog and learn section cover milk science, cultures and coagulation, aging and affinage, and troubleshooting a first few batches, and the Cheese & Dairy Museum is a browsable collection of hard cheeses, soft and bloomy-rind cheeses, fresh cheeses, and the tools of the craft, with every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

A few things worth stating plainly. CurdCraft is an independent site, not affiliated with any dairy, cheesemaking-supply company, or food-safety authority. It is supported by advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no account required. Every result the tools produce — a yield estimate, a rennet dose, a scaled culture amount, an aging weight estimate, an acidity reading, a brine recipe — is a general estimate built on standard formulas and the numbers you enter, not a professional or official determination. Home cheesemaking carries real food-safety considerations, so always follow a tested recipe and current food-safety guidance, particularly around raw milk, pasteurization, and aging temperatures. If something looks off in a tool or an article, or you think a calculator is missing that would help, the contact page is the place to say so.