New Adventures in Cheese Making

The other day I made the last of my mozzarella for the season (need enough in the freezer for pizza while the girls are dry during the last two months of their pregnancies). I also finished up the last of my liquid rennet and was ready to try my new Walcoren powdered. It was time for a new adventure in cheese making! For that, I wanted to start working my way through this book by David Asher. ➘

Why this book? Because I’m a self-sufficiency wannabe. That means I look for ways to make cheese without having to continually buy cheese cultures. My first cheeses were based on a recipe that I called my Little House on the Prairie Cheese. I used whey as my starter culture instead of a meso or thermophilic culture. Those first cheeses were okay, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with them. This book uses kefir, which I make regularly, so it perked my interest.

To start, I wanted a firm, ready-to-eat cheese that I could slice for sandwiches or burgers, or grate to use in eggs or fajitas. For that it made sense to start with the basic rennet curd cheese (chapter 13), because the author says it’s the foundational cheese for most other cheeses: fresh, brine-aged (feta), pasta filata (stretched cheeses such as mozzarella), white-rinded, blue, alpine, washed rind, washed curd, or cheddared. That’s a lot of variations from one basic process, so it seemed like the place to start.

Here are the notes from my cheese journal:

• 1 gallon *skimmed raw goat milk
• 1/4 cup freshly drained kefir
• 1/32 tsp powdered calf rennet (WalcoRen)
• 1 tsp non-chlorinated water

8:30 a.m. – set milk to warm slowly on stove
9:30 a.m. – milk temp 90°F (32°C), stir in kefir
10:00 a.m. – mix rennet in water, set aside to dissolve
10:30 a.m. – stir rennet solution into milk. Let sit & keep at 90°F (32°C)
11:30 a.m. – clean break, cut curd, stir occasionally (85° reheat to 90°)
12:30 p.m. – let curds settle
12:35 p.m. – pour off whey and drain. Pack curds into molds

The instructions said the curds would knit together as they sat in the molds. I was a tad dubious how well that would happen without weighting them, but at that point I had an errand to run, so off I went. A couple hours later I was able to remove them from the molds.

They were firm enough to handle – no crumbling. I was impressed. I rubbed each with canning salt. They were covered with a dish cloth and allowed to air dry for about 24 hours, flipping occasionally.

I was very curious when I sliced the first one and was pleased with the texture.

They were firmer than I expected, especially for the curds only being hand packed. And the cheese had good flavor, even without aging! A keeper!

The other thing that is different with this recipe, is that the curds weren’t “cooked.” That’s usually what’s done after the curd is cut in the pot. The temperature of the curds in whey is typically raised to anywhere between 100°F (38°C) and 110°F (43°C) depending on the desired result. This recipe maintained a curd temperature at 90°F (32°C).

The final test was the melting test.

It melted beautifully and made a delicious sandwich. Definitely a keeper. The only thing I will do differently next time is to put all the curds into one mold. I’d like the cheese to be sandwich size and fit on a slice of bread.

I’m really excited about this new direction for my cheesemaking. I have quite a bit of milk right now, so it’s a good time to experiment.

*NOTE: Practically all of my homemade cheeses are made from skimmed milk. Not because I especially want it that way, but because I use my own raw goat milk which is not homogenized. Goat cream is slower to rise than cows cream, but by the time I’m ready to make cheese, it is ready to skim. This has been one of my cheese making challenges, because whole milk cheeses are tastier than skim milk cheeses. David’s book explains that once the cream has separated from the milk it can’t be reincorporated to make a whole milk cheese. The cream comes out with the whey! I’ve had that happen and now understand why my old time cheese recipes, such as in Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, often call for adding that morning’s milk to the previous day’s milking. Their cheeses would have been partially whole milk cheeses.