The making a cheese press thread is getting questions on making cheese so I thought I would bring this thread to the surface. This was my suggestion
saving everything but the water.I don't have much to suggest. Though I really like the the bucket idea. But I do have some cautionary tales to tell based on our experience in the 1950's when we were milking 20 does. There was 2 days each week when we would get ahead of the sales. We would warm up the evening milk and add the fresh morning milking directly to the separator. We would then make ice cream or butter from the cream and freeze it. We decided to make cheese with the warm skim milk. My carpenter father built a nice cheese closet in the milk house that was separate from the barn and milking parlor. [We were completely set up as the Washington state law now regulates raw milk but that was before the current regulations]
We did not want to use paraffin to seal the cheese so we used some of the butter. That was nice short term but long term the cheese continued to dry It got so hard we could not even grate it for parmizon. What we wound up doing was clean the band saw and cut it in thin slices. Then the crumbled thin slices along with the sawdust made good parmizon.
Later we visited with an elderly european goat dairy in the cascades And I learned to make a cheese that includes everything but the water. It is not sold because as I heard in one podcast the demand would be so great that the one making it would not be able to keep any for themselves. Here is the method if you want to try it. Do not use a cultured curd because ant acid in the whey will get too concentrated.
Make your curd as for cottage cheese. We used glass gallon jars to set the curd in and we had stainless fry pan the would hold a gallon of liquid. We put the whey in the pan on the stove to simmer to evaporate the water. the ball of cheese would hang over the pan to continue to drain. as we would come and go we would remove any cured that reformed in the heated whey. When the level got low in the pan then it required constant attention. Turn the heat as low as possible to prevent scorching and stir constantly with a spatula. At this point it is mostly clarified butter and the remaining salts, sugars and protein. If it is too hot steam bubbles will make it splatter. Now comes the secret; mix the concentrate back into the curd. The sugar will have caramelized slightly so it will make it mottled like colby jack. Because you have preserved the salts it usually dose not need any additional salt.
I found molding it in a cake pan worked best. If you can resist eating it all it is even better when coated with brie rind. I did that by inoculating the top in the cake pan then when the surface was covered I turned it out onto a woven cedar mat made by splitting the
kindling at each ring Then I kept it in the refrigerator in a cake cover until it was cured..