2010. augusztus 31., kedd

Cheeeeeeeese!

I bake bread, I have my own sausage but for a long time I wanted to add cheese to my repertoire. Why? I don't really know - it's just fun! The tricky thing is that there are thousands of recipes and it's not easy at all to decide what do I really want?! So first I went for a "generic" method to see what it gives and next time I could deviate. Try and see! OK, let's see what do you need to make cheese:

  1. Milk, preferably raw milk - unpasteurized. Heat treatment changes the structure of the calcium in the milk and makes it unsuitable for cheese making. You can still make cheese using pasteurized milk but you have to add diluted CaCl2 . 
  2. Rennet is necessary for the coagulation of the milk (see below)
  3. Cheese culture (for many cheese recipes cheese culture is not necessary at all)
  4. Gauze - big one and sterile
  5. Thermometer, syringe, etc...
I bought 4.5 litres of raw cow milk for 3 EUR at a local dairy farm. First I needed to heat it up to 32 degrees Celsius which is the ideal temperature for the coagulation to begin...


 Next step is to add the rennet. To do that I needed a very small syringe. 1 ml of rennet is enough for 2 litres of milk (depends on the type of the rennet, check the manual!). I added 2 ml of rennet and 1 g of Choozit cheese culture  and then waited 30 minutes. Normally the coagulation should be ready after 30 minutes but for me nothing has happened so I added another 1 ml of rennet. One has to be careful because too much rennet makes the cheese taste bitter. Maybe I made a mistake to put the rennet and the cheese culture into the milk at the same time. I have read afterwards that one should wait 30 to 60 minutes after the cheese culture is added and then comes the rennet. But to be honest I've read the opposite of that too...


Finally after more than 1 hour it started to look nice:


After that I cut the solidified milk so that the whey (lactic acid) would be more easily separated. The size of the cuttings are also determining the structure of the cheese but I don't know exactly how? I guess 1x1 cm should be OK...


Now I filtered it through the gauze and let it drip for 2 hours. Meanwhile I prepared a 25% salt dilution with the leftover whey (1 litres of whey + 250 g salt)...


After 2 hours of dripping I put it (together with the gauze) into the salt bath for 3 hours. Then came the press (3kg) for 8 hours. Unfortunately I don't have a professional cheese press so I used a wooden plate and some heavy bottles filled with water. And finally this is how it looked after the press:




Next step is the aging and that's the most difficult to do at home. One should find a place where the temperature is 10-15 degrees Celsius and the humidity is 90% at the beginning but then it should be decreased (it also depends on the recipe). The cheese has to be turned regularly (every day, every 3rd day it depends...) and it has to be lubricated with a salty dilution. Ideally that would kill off the unwanted bacteria and mildow and that creates a hard crust on the cheese. So far I put it into a fridge. It's 9 degrees Celsius there and the humidity I don't know. I will do that salty bath every second day and then I don't know... wait and see!