Baskets

These may look a little homely compared to the rest of my baskets, but that's because they've gotten more work than (nearly) all of them! These are the baskets that started it all - I was making cheese, and one of my cheese books had a note about using cheese baskets rather than plastic molds. I was intrigued, and gave it a shot, and then realized that I also liked making baskets! But they're also very useful in cheese-making!

Baskets (and/or molds) are used at the curd-draining stage of cheese-making, and I've found that baskets are much more efficient at draining than plastic molds - molds are only able to drain via gravity, and have a comparatively small draining surface (the base of the mold), while baskets are also able to wick away liquid through the reed, which makes for a much more efficient draining process, and one that happens much more evenly. Some cheeses are flipped halfway through the draining process, and the baskets make that much easier - because the outer edges have less liquid, the cheese is less likely to crumble under gentle handling. 

(This doesn't apply to the pyramidal mold - for obvious reasons, cheeses made in that mold can't be flipped within the mold but they can be turned upside down on a reed mat to drain their 'bottoms'.)

The reed also gives the final cheese a very distinctive and pleasing texture, and cheeses with mold coats (eg. brie/Camembert) seem to have an easier time forming on that texture.

The downside of baskets is that they're harder to sanitize than plastic molds - which isn't the end of the world, if you're making the same cheese over and over, but is a little annoying if you're making a variety of cheeses. The basket reed becomes permeated with microbes involved in the cheese-making process and an re-infect the surface of your cheeses during the forming process. If you're making blue cheeses especially, this may be a problem (as all your cheeses may become blue cheeses after draining them in reed baskets).