If you have 4,000 lbs. of milk in the cheese vat to ripen with 2% or 80 lbs. starter, prepare 88 lbs. of mother starter. If, on the other hand, you wish to make only a quart of buttermilk every day, take, say, two buttermilk tablets, crush them thoroughly in a spoonful of pasteurized milk and stir this into a tumblerful of the same milk; let stand till it is thickened the next day and use a tablespoonful of this thickened milk in a quart of fresh pasteurized milk which when ripened is your buttermilk, from which you take out a tablespoonful for starter in the next batch, and so on. In this case there is no "mother starter" except that perhaps the first tumblerful prepared with the tablets may be called so, but afterwards the starter is taken right out of the finished product every day.
The process may be modified to suit special purposes and local conditions, but the following precautions should be strictly observed: (1) to interrupt the ripening immediately by quick and intense cooling as soon as it has reached the proper point in case the ripened product is not used at once, and (2) to keep it ice-cold until it is used. If this is done, it may be kept for two or three days without deterioration if it is not convenient to make it fresh every day which, however, should be the rule.
