curds

I finally broke down and made cheese this weekend. After making bread, beer, and sausage, the next logical step was obviously cheese :). In the past I've curdled milk to make a sort of soft ricotta/paneer like cheese. This yielded a reasonably tasty product, but I wanted something more. So I did some preliminary research online and realized that I couldn't make cheese without a few extra ingredients - notably some sort of cheese culture and rennet. As it turns out these items are very easy to procure online (got everything here) and aren't all that expensive. 

So first things first... get the milk. now ideally you'd use non-pasturized, non-homogonized milk. Unfortunately, this is quite hard to find - especially finding raw milk, which is actually illegal to sell. Unless you're friendly with a dairy farmer, you're probably out of luck. Fortunately, this isn't the end of the world - it just reduces the cheese's ultimate flavor profile. The fact that it's homogenized is a bigger concern. If the milk is homogenized, it won't coagulate and form curds. There are several ways around this. Non-homogenized milk is available in some stores. I've found it in several shops throughout Atlanta for instance. Alternatively, you can use powdered skim milk and heavy cream. This was actually recommended on a site I was using as reference, and since that meant I didn't have to store two gallons of milk in the fridge, I opted for this method. 

So now the rest of the directions:

1. Pasteurize the milk to 143F, hold 1 hour, then cool back to 86F - this kills off the bad bacteria, then prepares the milk for the culture.

2. Add the culture and incubate for an hour. This allows the culture to propagate and start developing flavor. I used Mesophilic-A culture, which seems to be the most basic culture used for Cheddars, goat cheese and others simple cheeses. So far, this is no different than making yogurt.

3. Now that the culture is good and strong, it's time to coagulate! (ie split the whey from the curds). This is done with rennet. Pitfall here is to use tap water with the rennet - the chlorine makes it infective, so you have to use distilled water, or boil the water first.

4. That's pretty much it, now you simply have to cut up the curds, drain and air dry for a few days.

So in the end, this was a relatively simple process, but it took a while. Bringing two gallons of milk down from 140F to 85F took longer than anticipated. Mixing two gallons of powdered milk was also trickier than expected (don't want any lumps!). But in the end I did get the cheese curds I was after, and they taste pretty good to boot. Not exactly like wisconsin cheese curds which are squeeky and relatively mild. These have a bit of that tartness I normally associate with goat cheese, and they're textured like a hard fresh cheese. They are quite delicious though, and have definitely inspired me to try more tricky cheeses. Incidentally, they melt pretty nicely too :)

For reference: I used this site primarily. I also refered to this one, which is nicely illustrated. They explain things in far more detail than I do here, and I would certainly recommend reading through those before attempting your own cheese. Next adventure: pressed cheese... stay tuned.

Oh and I almost forgot. I saved the whey and made real ricotta. I only got about a cup of it, but you just re-cook the whey and re-coagulate it. Ideally the whey would have been acid enough to precipitate the curds on its own, but I had to add a bit of vinegar. I think my mistake was keeping the whey in the fridge overnight, instead of out... Anyway, moral of the story: tasty byproducts are good - I think we learned that in bschool.