Standard cheese making methods require a "Mother Culture", prepared in advance.

In order to make cheese, I first needed to make up a batch of mother culture by incubating some milk with my culture and then leaving it, at the correct temperature, for 12 hours or even longer. Then I could use this mother culture to incubate the milk I was going to use to make the cheese. This meant that if I wanted to make cheese, I needed to make the mother culture one day and then make the cheese the next. So waking up on a Saturday morning and saying “I think I will make cheese today” was just not going to happen. I needed to plan ahead, be more organized….. or just not get around to making that cheese. You can guess what happened. No cheese.

Direct set cultures allow for that spur of the moment ... "Let's Make Cheese" decision

The solution was direct set culture. With direct set culture you completely bypass the step of making the mother culture. Direct set culture is simply added directly to the milk you are going to use to make the cheese. That means that you can decide to make cheese that day and just go right ahead and do it, without delay. Direct set culture has made cheese making so simple for me that I now make a hard cheese just about every Saturday, while I am throwing in the laundry and getting all that other must-be-done work done around the house. The cheese is then pressed overnight, while I am sleeping, and is ready in the morning to remove from the mould. It takes a day or two for the cheese to dry, and then I wax the cheese and put it away in storage to age to perfection.