The trick to forming a uniform paste with this recipe is to prepress the curd. after you are done cooking at 45 mins, let the curds all settle under whey. Before, you were stirring so the curds would not mat together. Now you want them to mat. So let them all go to the bottom and check back in 10-15 mins. Take your hands and press the curds, squishing them gently to the bottom of the pot. The whey is warm, and when you do this, the curds will mat together. It helps to avoid mechanical inclusions. Press for 10-15 times, gently, or if they are not matting, with some more pressure and 15-20 times. Then when you pour off the whey, you will not be scooping curds, you will be taking out a curd wheel that's already formed. That's why in the original post, I suggested to use a pot with a diameter close to the diameter of your mold, so that you can just plop that wheel right out into the cheesecloth and mold and put some weight on it.

That tomme mold is fine, tommes just need 10-20 lbs of weight and 4-8 flips to get the water out. They wind up rather plasticky and somewhat moist out of the press, a bit like a jarlsberg does.