Beer and Cheese Making Day
Today is Beer and Cheese day in my kitchen... not eating, Making! I just scored some raw milk and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. My malt syrup is nice and dark and I managed to buy hops before the shortage (we had a hops warehouse go up in flames) so my hops are nice and fresh smelling.
So I've already described what a simple joy beermaking is. Well, cheesemaking is just as fun and as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
I got a kit a while back from my mother-in-law. It came from http://www.cheesemaking.com and included a few things: mesophilic direct set starter culture packets, thermophilic direct set starter packets, rennet tablets, calcium chloride solution, a small colander, cheese cloth, a thermometer, some recipes and cheese wax.
The book I have is called Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carrol, but On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee is a phenomenal book. He actually bothers to tell you what’s going on on a molecular, socio-economic, historical, cultural level for a ton of different foods, including cheese.
So I’ll summarize the procedure for making cheese so you can imagine how fun it is. Keep in mind, this is just a summary of how one would make an simple semihard type of cheese. The process varies significantly from one cheese to the next and subtle changes in temperature and handling will dramatically affect the taste.
You start with some milk, obviously, and all my recipes are for 2 gallon batches. If it is pasteurized (avoid ultra-pasteurized products) and homogenized, you have to add calcium chloride. No, I don’t know what the concentration of the solution is that I have, nor did they want to tell me. Here is an interesting research paper about variables affecting curd firmness: http://jds.fass.org/cgi/reprint/68/10/2527.pdf
Heat treated milk and goats milk somehow lock up some calcium that is needed for the rennet to coagulate the curd properly. Use raw milk if you can, it will make a firmer curd. Add 16 oz of cream back into homogenized milk to simulate real milk.
I heat my milk in a big stock pot in a roasting pan full of water. I bring the water up to the temperature needed (usually hit it straight from the hot tap), then I put the stock pot full of milk on some metal blocks to allow flow under the pot. I fashioned a thermometer holder out of wire that holds the thermometer for me, which helps me keep a close eye on the temperature. It is wise to sterilize all your tools before you do anything.
After bringing the milk up to temperature, starter bacteria is added and allowed to propagate for a while. Starter bacteria convert sugar to lactic acid, increasing the acidity of the milk, encouraging curd formation, and discouraging growth of nasties. There are two major groups, the mesophilic (moderate temperature lactococci) and thermophilic (heat loving streptococci). Most cheeses are made with the mesophilic, but some cheeses that are cooked (mozzarella is one) need thermophiles that will survive the heating process. Not only do these guys acidify the milk, but continue to contribute to the flavor after the fact. Most recipes start out by mildly heating the milk, adding mesophilic culture, letting it sit at that temperature for a while, then adding the rennet.
The rennet (a calf enzyme called ‘chymosin’) is usually ‘vegetable rennet’ which is produced by engineered bacteria, mold, or yeast. The rennet is a digestive enzyme that cuts a single milk protein at a single point. This makes a solid gel curd that can be cut easily. Rennet usually comes in tablets that must first be dissolved in some water, then stirred into the milk gently. More time passes at temperature in the water bath (about 45 min) and the curd is ready to be cut once it exhibits a 'clean break'. 'Clean break' just means when you stick something in the pot, the curd moves out of the way and the resulting hole fills with whey. Cutting happens with a knife inserted in the curd and cut with the knife vertical and the knife at an angle to get sort of 'cubes'. In hard cheeses, the curd is cooked gently after cutting to drive whey out of the curds. Gently means carefully raising the temperature a couple of degrees every five minutes or so to about ten degrees hotter than it was before.
So the curd shrinks, and at this point there is a messy whey draining process for which I use a big colander lined with the cheesecloth. Make sure you have something handy for the whey-empty milk jugs are good. You can either use it afterwards to make ricotta (which I never had luck with when tried with pasteurized milk), chilled drinks, or whey pickles (check out a book called 'Nourishing Traditions' by Sally Fallon for lacto-fermented veggie recipes). It’s generally pretty tasty stuff. I like it chilled, and I use it in breadmaking as often as possible. I’ve heard of people adding Tang to it and giving it to their kids. It also makes great pig slop, from what I’ve read.
Then you tie the corners of the cheesecloth and hang it somewhere to drip for a while, when called for. For this I hang the curd sack from a clothes hangar over a pot from the sheet metal lip on my fume hood over the stove. .
After draining, you massage some salt into the curd (called milling the curd).
Once drained and milled, if making a semihard or hard cheese, you put it in the small colander or a cheese press. I like the colander that came with my kit; it is nearly cylindrical, about five or six inches in diameter and about three inches high. I use a plastic container lid the same size as the colander, a block of wood on top of that, and a pan with the necessary amount of lead shot (still in the bag and wrapped in duct tape) for the weight called for in the recipe. I have a screw/springs/follower style cheese press, but it is for one gallon batches, and weak curd squidges out the bottom pretty easily. After some amount of time passes in the press (usually overnight), you turn the cheese over and press it some more. After it has finished pressing, you let it air dry (I dry mine on a bamboo cutting board) for some number of days before waxing, turning daily to help the cheese develop a nice rind. After a few days, the rind is nice and tough and it kind of looks like cheese, so it’s ready for wax. I melt the wax in a foil pie pan in a shallow pan of water on the stove, let it melt, then paint it on with a paintbrush. Add a label to the cheese with the date to be opened and paint over that in a thin layer of wax. Eat after aging. Yum.
So I've already described what a simple joy beermaking is. Well, cheesemaking is just as fun and as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
I got a kit a while back from my mother-in-law. It came from http://www.cheesemaking.com and included a few things: mesophilic direct set starter culture packets, thermophilic direct set starter packets, rennet tablets, calcium chloride solution, a small colander, cheese cloth, a thermometer, some recipes and cheese wax.
The book I have is called Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carrol, but On Food and Cooking, by Harold McGee is a phenomenal book. He actually bothers to tell you what’s going on on a molecular, socio-economic, historical, cultural level for a ton of different foods, including cheese.
So I’ll summarize the procedure for making cheese so you can imagine how fun it is. Keep in mind, this is just a summary of how one would make an simple semihard type of cheese. The process varies significantly from one cheese to the next and subtle changes in temperature and handling will dramatically affect the taste.
You start with some milk, obviously, and all my recipes are for 2 gallon batches. If it is pasteurized (avoid ultra-pasteurized products) and homogenized, you have to add calcium chloride. No, I don’t know what the concentration of the solution is that I have, nor did they want to tell me. Here is an interesting research paper about variables affecting curd firmness: http://jds.fass.org/cgi/reprint/68/10/2527.pdf
Heat treated milk and goats milk somehow lock up some calcium that is needed for the rennet to coagulate the curd properly. Use raw milk if you can, it will make a firmer curd. Add 16 oz of cream back into homogenized milk to simulate real milk.
I heat my milk in a big stock pot in a roasting pan full of water. I bring the water up to the temperature needed (usually hit it straight from the hot tap), then I put the stock pot full of milk on some metal blocks to allow flow under the pot. I fashioned a thermometer holder out of wire that holds the thermometer for me, which helps me keep a close eye on the temperature. It is wise to sterilize all your tools before you do anything.
After bringing the milk up to temperature, starter bacteria is added and allowed to propagate for a while. Starter bacteria convert sugar to lactic acid, increasing the acidity of the milk, encouraging curd formation, and discouraging growth of nasties. There are two major groups, the mesophilic (moderate temperature lactococci) and thermophilic (heat loving streptococci). Most cheeses are made with the mesophilic, but some cheeses that are cooked (mozzarella is one) need thermophiles that will survive the heating process. Not only do these guys acidify the milk, but continue to contribute to the flavor after the fact. Most recipes start out by mildly heating the milk, adding mesophilic culture, letting it sit at that temperature for a while, then adding the rennet.
The rennet (a calf enzyme called ‘chymosin’) is usually ‘vegetable rennet’ which is produced by engineered bacteria, mold, or yeast. The rennet is a digestive enzyme that cuts a single milk protein at a single point. This makes a solid gel curd that can be cut easily. Rennet usually comes in tablets that must first be dissolved in some water, then stirred into the milk gently. More time passes at temperature in the water bath (about 45 min) and the curd is ready to be cut once it exhibits a 'clean break'. 'Clean break' just means when you stick something in the pot, the curd moves out of the way and the resulting hole fills with whey. Cutting happens with a knife inserted in the curd and cut with the knife vertical and the knife at an angle to get sort of 'cubes'. In hard cheeses, the curd is cooked gently after cutting to drive whey out of the curds. Gently means carefully raising the temperature a couple of degrees every five minutes or so to about ten degrees hotter than it was before.
So the curd shrinks, and at this point there is a messy whey draining process for which I use a big colander lined with the cheesecloth. Make sure you have something handy for the whey-empty milk jugs are good. You can either use it afterwards to make ricotta (which I never had luck with when tried with pasteurized milk), chilled drinks, or whey pickles (check out a book called 'Nourishing Traditions' by Sally Fallon for lacto-fermented veggie recipes). It’s generally pretty tasty stuff. I like it chilled, and I use it in breadmaking as often as possible. I’ve heard of people adding Tang to it and giving it to their kids. It also makes great pig slop, from what I’ve read.
Then you tie the corners of the cheesecloth and hang it somewhere to drip for a while, when called for. For this I hang the curd sack from a clothes hangar over a pot from the sheet metal lip on my fume hood over the stove. .
After draining, you massage some salt into the curd (called milling the curd).
Once drained and milled, if making a semihard or hard cheese, you put it in the small colander or a cheese press. I like the colander that came with my kit; it is nearly cylindrical, about five or six inches in diameter and about three inches high. I use a plastic container lid the same size as the colander, a block of wood on top of that, and a pan with the necessary amount of lead shot (still in the bag and wrapped in duct tape) for the weight called for in the recipe. I have a screw/springs/follower style cheese press, but it is for one gallon batches, and weak curd squidges out the bottom pretty easily. After some amount of time passes in the press (usually overnight), you turn the cheese over and press it some more. After it has finished pressing, you let it air dry (I dry mine on a bamboo cutting board) for some number of days before waxing, turning daily to help the cheese develop a nice rind. After a few days, the rind is nice and tough and it kind of looks like cheese, so it’s ready for wax. I melt the wax in a foil pie pan in a shallow pan of water on the stove, let it melt, then paint it on with a paintbrush. Add a label to the cheese with the date to be opened and paint over that in a thin layer of wax. Eat after aging. Yum.