Cheese - Report 1

Cheese report 1

It's been a while, but I logged in to post something to prove who I was to a forum I'd lost my password to. 

Anyway, that's not important, but I found hundreds of draft posts that were partially written that I'd been working on in order to keep something posted every day or whatever my schedule was. 

I read a few, and I thought this one was fun, so I thought I'd drop it onto the planet. 

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Cheese report...

Haloumi - All consumed yum - Cant recommend you try this enough. Instant easy cheesy fun.

Bouteille Cheese (cheese in a bottle) - don't try this wacky idea -  this its not so cheese-like. But it is actually getting cheesyer by the minute.

Reasonable cheese - confidently named and true to name, this looks like it might be working.

Cheese - Where are all the good bits?

The best bits of hard cheese are the white specks that sparkle on the tongue and make you ratchet up to the next price or age range, and give your cheese maker more of your money.

These tasty white specks on aged cheese are the result of enzymes and other interesting things acting on complex fats that are broken down into free fatty acids. Whatever "free fatty acids"are.

I'll let you know if they turn out to be important, but compared to how important cheese is, I'm guessing they rank a distant second at best, so this is probably the last you will hear of them from me.

The result is these little crystalline bursts of awesomeness that you can see distributed around in cheeses like parmesan.

They are delicious.

Go and open the fridge or climb down into your celler now and have a look.

Better yet dig out all the crystalline bits and eat them all, and see what I mean.

Nobody else in your house will mind.

I'll wait.

See how absurdly delicious they are?

So....

It turns out these crystals of goodness form over time as the cheese drys from the outside in. As a result, you should buy cheese from the outside of a round rather than the inside, as even though the entire cheese is the same age, the cheese on the inside hasn't "aged" as much.

Probably to do with it drying or it's exposure to air or something.

It doesn't matter. Buy the stuff nearest the rind, and nearest to the outside of the round.

But my question is...

Why dont they just make parmesan with a hole through the middle like a doughnut to allow the air into the centre?

120ThingsIn20Years is eating cheese, and thinks it should be even better.

Cheese - Temperature control 33c

Is it just me, or does everyone constantly place thermometers all over the house, probing for suitable places to make cheese?

Last year, a good friend and bee whisperer, took pity on the quality of the coffee served at our house, and gifted Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years an espresso machine.

This was an unfortunate development, because now, no matter what, we always have to have one.

But I discovered, aside from making perfect coffee,  it also makes for the perfect place to keep a small cheese making venture at 33c.

The only difficult thing about making my totally successful bovine variety of haloumi, was keeping the temperature at around 30c.

Not that it was all that difficult to do, but it was the most difficult bit among a stack of easy things.

Our (see me claim ownership) little espresso machine has a plate on top that is warm whenever it's switched on. I'm guessing its to keep cups warm. You would have to drink a lot of coffee to leave the thing switched on, and because we try to maintain sanity, we don't use it.

As a result, it's always available for cheese making.

Thanks espresso machine.

Thanks Buzzy.

Cheese - Fine temperature control - double boiler

In my efforts to gain 120 new skills over the next 20 years, I have been so incredibly impressed, and utterly amazed at the generosity of everyone out there in internet land. It's as if all the world wants to do, is to help me on my quest to learn stuff.

Thanks internet.

Thanks all the world.

With some topics, I feel I've been able to contribute in some way to the body of knowledge. But in some, it's as if everything has been tried and tested, and then tried and tested again. It's as if the topic is sorted. Windmills spring to mind. No doubt there is still a lot to be done with windmills, but I suspect NASA might have more to do with it than someone like me.

I guess the age of the topic at hand has something to do with this. Aquaponics is probably always going to be easier to contribute to, than say, something like cheese making....

Cue dramatic music ........

I have something for cheese making.

There is this thing in the cooking world called a double boiler, and it's usefulness stems from the fact that water doesn't get hotter than 100c (boiling water) no matter what you do to it.

If you try to heat water hotter than it's boiling point, it cools itself by turning to steam and laughs right in your face.

"Ha ha!" It laughs.

What this means is you can stick a bowl over a pot of boiling or simmering water, and be sure you wont get temperatures any more extreme than 100c. In reality you are more likely to see temperatures in your bowl in the high 60c's.

But there are a few things you can do to get even more control.

And as usual if this isn't an original idea, I apologise, but as far as I know blah blah blah disclaimer etc etc etc ...

But it turns out, if you are trying to invent something completely unrelated, and take out everything from your kitchen cupboards, and spread it all out over the floor (again), sometimes you get some ideas. Some of them can even be good.

These ideas may not solve the problem you were hoping to solve, but may still be useful.

Cue dramatic music again........

Use a rice cooker. 

If you dont have one and you like to cook rice and are lucky enough to live the developed world, a rice cooker is a really good thing to have. 

It cooks rice.

Really well.

You should get one.

One of the cool things about a rice cooker is that it will cook your rice to perfection, then switch over to a "keep" mode, where it keeps it at a temperature hot enough to serve, but not so hot that it dries out. It can keep it at this nice temperature for 5 hours or something. Very convenient, as far as not needing to have good timing when feeding people.

Handy.

Even more handy if you want to control temperatures for making cheese or something.

The first thing you can do is put some water in a rice cooker, and set it on "keep", instead of cook. This will get you a device that holds a temperature of around 46c. Perhaps suitable for melting chocolate or something. I don't know. But it could be handy. After all I have another 110 or so things to learn, so I'm sure 46c will be something I need one day down the track. Yoghurt? mmm yogurt. What temperature do you need for yoghurt...   Stop distracting me yoghurt.

The next thing you can try is placing a bowl of something on top of the rice cooker on "keep". This will get you 43c or there abouts.

High temperature rice cooker double boiler

But then, and this is the bit I'm most proud of, you can add three tapered chopsticks in such a way as to make it so the bowl rests on them rather than the rim of the rice cooker. Just jam them in between the bowl and the rice cooker rim, one at a time, but spread out evenly around the bowl.

Low temperature rice cooker double boiler

You can then slide the chopstick in or out to adjust the gap between the rice cooker, and the bowl you are trying to gently heat. This allows for pretty much any temperature you desire. All you need is a thick enough chopstick for the gap/temperature you require and you get total control.

The bigger the gap, the cooler the bowl of stuff. Just force whatever you can find in there that gives you the correct gap, and thus the correct temperature.

You can also play around with the water depth.

If you don't have chopsticks, you can use the ones you buy tomorrow!

Cheese - Blue (and brown) vein

I did say I would do 120 things in 20 years, but made no reference to doing those 120 things particularly well. I need to try harder. Or use salt when its called for.

It's a shame I called it cheese instead of penicillin. It may have been successful as penicillin.

It actually smells a lot like a nice cheese, but unless I can find someone within the next few days who doesn't like to be alive so much any more, I don't think anyone will be tasting  it.

Sadly the other one is also going mouldy. This one has a much better texture than the first, but no pleasant aroma. In fact it has almost no aroma. Extra bland blue (and brown) vein cheese has no market potential as far as my research can determine.

Cheese - So far

So far, I get the feeling its relatively easy to make cheese, it's just difficult to make a particular cheese.

I also get the feeling my cheese making will be seen to have failed two months down the track when I taste it. So it's important to take my cheese making history into account when reading everything I have to offer on cheese. That bit's worth reading twice.

Almost all the research I have done points to really only a few steps to making cheese. Almost all the cheeses have these steps. Sometimes not all the steps, and occasionally in a slightly different order.

• starting a culture 
• acidification
• setting the curd
• heat treating the curds
• separating the curds from the whey
• pressing the curds
• aging the cheese
• eating the cheese

There some obvious exceptions to these, say, in the case of the fresh cheeses that are eaten before aging, and might not be pressed. Or even in the case of haloumi where the final process might be to fry it. Mozzarella is another exception where there is a cooking and pulling stage. I might have to make mozzerella, it looks like fun. Then there are cheeses that are dosed with mold as in the case of the blue vein cheeses. But even those cheeses are made with many of the basic steps shown in the bullet list.  

Each different variety of cheese may be only due to a tiny change in the temperature, or a small difference in the amount of pressure used to press it. Some cheese even has two faces, in that it can be eaten as a table cheese in its first few months of aging, and then goes on to be a hard cheese suitable for grating and cooking with as it ages a year or more. 

Making cheese to be aged takes a lot of preparation, a lot of time, and, if you are anything like me, every dish, pan, and kitchen surface you have in your home. It also requires some specialist equipment. Making cheese to be aged for a few months has so far been an extremely interesting, and fun thing do, and I'll definitely do it again once I equip myself better. Then there is also the issue of storage. Where does one store one's cheese for up to a year at 12 deg C and 85% humidity?

My recomendation to the novice would be to make my fabulously successful haloumi.

• It worked well.
• It tasted better than anything I've ever eaten in the whole wide world.
• It was easy to make.
• It was easy to make the second time (although quite different)
• It was good value for money.
• It was relatively child friendly in that it, for the most part, it needed low temperatures.
• It could be eaten within hours or starting the project, meaning you get to see if it worked right away, and you don't need a storage facility to protect it through it's aging process, and any children involved will not have grown up and moved out before its tasting time. 

If you try it, you will make it again, and again, and it will become an heirloom dish for your family. I promise!

Cheese - Reasonable cheese brining

This part 3 of reasonable cheese will see me treating the outer layer of the cheese to form a skin or rind.

I successfully made my Reasonable Cheese, and eventually pressing it into shape and a cheese-like consistency. The next step was to stop it going rotten. From what I can tell, there appears to be a few different ways of doing this including doing nothing at all, waxing, salting, soaking in brine, rubbing with vinegar, or simply eating it right away.

I chose brining.

First I created a saturated salt solution. I mixed salt into water until I could mix no more. It turned out to be around 200g of salt in 800ml of hot water.

I left it to cool, then added my Reasonable Cheese to sit overnight in the brine.

Ten hours later I discovered a thing that looked a lot like a cheese.











Now I wait. And wait. For between two and six months.

I'm not sure if this cheese worked or not yet. It seems like it may have, but there is no way for the novice to have any real clue as to the success or otherwise of this project for months to come.

This cheese was quite complicated to make and required some specialist equipment. There was a lot to learn, and still is a lot to learn. One major concern I have is the size of the cheese. A small cheese will turn to a small cheese rind before its even ready to eat. I suspect that's why a lot of small cheeses are waxed. ie To prevent them drying out. The first cheese I attempted is already more of a cheese rind than a cheese.

I will make more of this kind, or similar table cheese, but will do so with a great deal more planning and some more equipment. I will also make much bigger cheeses and more of them. I think, to be practical, a batch of cheese would need to be made with more like twenty or thirty litres of milk rather than four litres. There is also the issue of cost. Unless this cheese turns out to be very special indeed, it will have cost much more than it will be worth. Having said that, I am now in possession of the only cheese of its kind. And the last piece of it at that. Effectively an almost un-reproducible, and thus priceless cheese by any standard.

Or not.

Only a great deal of time will tell.

Cheese - Reasonable cheese 2

Continued from yesterday, we saw the curd set enough to get a relatively clean break.

The next step is to cut the curds into dice sized cubes. This doesn't need to be too fussy as far as size goes as the object is just to allow as much whey to escape the curd as possible. Some people use a whisk to gently cut their curds. I used a long knife. Either way, just try to not leave any large pieces.

I then raised the temperature gradually over 15 minutes until it was around 39 deg C, and held it there for an hour stirring gently every few minutes to prevent the curds from clumping.

Some of the cheeses I've read about included a step in their manufacture that involved replacing the whey with clean water for the final cooking. For no better reason other than it seemed like a good idea at the time, I did that. I drained the whey (pictured), then added hot water until the temperature read 43 deg C and held it at that temperature for about 15 minutes stirring gently.

After the 15 minutes the whey got smaller, tighter, and more dense. It sunk to the bottom as soon as it was let off the spoon.

It was time to deploy the "120 things in 20 years whey cool cheese press".

So I did.

I poured off the water, and tipped the curd into a cotton cloth lined strainer.

I then placed the wrapped curd into the press and clamped it down without going crazy on the pressure.

After 10 minutes I changed the cloth, flipped it over and clamped it down again for around 15 minutes.

Not a lot of whey came out this time. I covered it in yet another cotton cloth, flipped it over again, and clamped it down hard this time.

I left it overnight, and on opening it looks a lot like it did last night. But that's kind of ok, because last night it looked like a cheese.

It looks like a cheese but smells faintly of babies. Nice smelling, healthy, happy babies, but babies just the same.

I'm not sure that a cheese should smell like a baby.

Maybe babies smell like cheese.



My cheese smells like babies.

Cheese - Reasonable cheese

I decided to try to make a cheese that works this time. This way I can discover If there are indeed any benefits from a slightly more reasonable approach to cheese making.

Keeping to my convention of giving cheeses grand names even before they turn out to be worth a name, and keeping with my new effort toward making a cheese that has a reasonable chance of becoming food, I have decided to call this attempt Reasonable Cheese.

I started as usual by sterilizing a few things, Including the plate to rest them on.

I then added four litres of pasteurized but non-homogenized milk to my saucepan. I added a random amount of starter culture, I'm guessing 1.5 grams.
And then left it sit for an hour at 32 deg C for an hour.

Four litres of milk represents an enormous confidence on my part.

After an hour I added around 2ml of rennet (I'm using a vegetarian version) and waited until the curd had set. There's a lot of waiting in this cheese making business.

Interestingly, this is the first time I have seen the green tinge to the whey that Iv'e read about. This could be a good sign.

In cheese making language, a clean break is when your whey has separated out, and your curds have set enough so that when you poke something into the curd on an angle, then lift it up, your curd should split rather than glug around. I struggled to get a picture of a clean break and failed in the end because I had tried breaks so many times there was no unbroken bit left.



The rest of this post will have to wait until tomorrow as I'm struggling to keep up with taking photos, blogging, and not destroying my cheese.

Cheese - Cheese press

After making fresh cheese, you need some kind of cheese press to to remove all the excess whey.

I got hold of some PVC storm water pipe and an end cap from stuff I bought to finish the bigger aquaponics project, a plastic lid from a coffee jar, and a clamp.

The idea was to attach the end cap and drill holes all over the place, so that when the coffee jar lid is pressed into it like a plunger, It should squish out as much or as little whey as desired. The coffee jar lid, like many things it turns out, is of a standard size and thus fits snuggly in the role of plunger.

The "120 things in 20 years whey cool cheese press" doesn't look particularly sterile, but it looks kind of cool. It should be capable of applying pressure ranging from a tiny bit, to WHEY too much.

I'll attempt some kind of sterilization on the entire apparatus. And perhaps some kind of pun removal procedure on myself.

This also means I'll be attempting to make some kind of cheese. I've been thinking that I might follow some directions this time. Or not. We shall see.





UPDATE:

According to an independent nose, my cheese's current bouquet is

• cheesy
• a little sweet
• vaguely salty
• a little bit like vinegar 

Cheese - Bouteille Cheese

[note from the future - this didnt work]

Apparently a cheese starter culture is a good thing to make before you try to make a cheese.

Cheese makers utilize various acidifying bacteria to turn the lactose (a sugar) into lactic acid. The one I'll be using was bought from a market stall called "The smelly cheese shop" in the Adelaide central markets, and probably contains Lactococcus and perhaps a little of some kind of yeast. Sadly there are no details as to whats in it or what I should do with it. 

After reading a bit I think I have some kind of a plan. [was written at 2pm]

After procrastinating a bit I think I have a different plan. [was written at 3pm]

OK I don't have a plan. 

But what I now have in place of a plan is a guarantee of outcome. I am now certain that this will either work, or not. 

Here's where my cheesy revolution is at so far.

I took two litres of pasteurized but not homogenized milk. And I left it in the bottle. Its already pretty sterile in there so I figured I'd leave it alone.

I sat it in the bottle in a saucepan filled with 50°C water until it to was at 50°C. I figured it was at 50°C when the saucepan stayed at a constant temp. I adjusted the temperature of the entire piece of kit, by just adding small amounts of boiling water to the saucepan whenever it needed it. It took about 15 mins. I'm sure the temperature of the milk will be something other than 50°C, but if this works, at least it should be reproducible. I stirred the saucepan water using the bottle, and from time to time I removed a bit of water with a mug whenever there wasn't enough room to add the small amounts of boiling water. 

Once the bottle of milk was at 50°C, I added a couple of grams of my store bought starter culture. I'm hoping this stuff reproduces up to some maxim population based on the amount of lactose available. If it does then it shouldn't really matter how much, or how little, I put in. Or not. Really I have no idea, but strive constantly to reassure myself.

I placed it in a foam box to keep it at a steady temperature. To help it maintain 50°C, I also put 6 litres of hot tap water in with it. 

I'll leave it in there until later tonight, then add some rennet to make it set. 

Tomorrow I'll have to figure out a way to cut the curd and press it. I'll try to work out a way to do it in the bottle as much as I can so I can keep it as sterile as I can for as long as I can.

Tomorrow I'll either have the beginnings of cheese in a bottle, some yogurt, or perhaps a new milk based life-form. 

Cheese - Fired haloumi

An unqualified success! I did make cheese. In fact I made a cow's milk version of haloumi.

Fresh (cow's milk) haloumi looks like this...

After running it through a menu that went something like this...

Pan fried bovine haloumi in garlic and fennel seed infused Italian olive oil with pistachio nuts, shallot, mushroom and tomato, on a bed of baby spinach with fresh cracked black pepper and a drizzle of lemon juice.

and it looked something like this...

And it was good. I would have been quite happy had I been served it in a restaurant. The only thing that could have made it better was to share it.

And I did...

I throughly recommend you give homemade haloumi a go. For the most part, the temperatures are all child friendly, so get some kids involved. It was much easier than I expected and I can't see much that could go wrong.

Total cost to make the cheese in Australian dollars was $4.39 in un-homogenized milk and a few cents worth of rennet.

Total time was around 3 hours. But with only a few minutes actual work. It's also worth noting that a larger batch would take no longer to prepare. I can see no problem with freezing this cheese.

I will definitely be making this cheese again and again.

Lastly I think I read somewhere that traditionally its stored in mint leaves. True or not, I put some mint into the container of cheese and it successfully imparts a subtle mint flavour that compliments the cheese nicely. I've also had it cooked with fennel leaves to excellent effect.

Cheese - Haloumi and ricotta

I think I just made cheese!                                                                  [see the full haloumi story]

Haloumi is made with goat or sheep milk, but not in my house. All I have is cow's milk. It's also interesting in that you can fry it. I think you can even deep fry it.

After reading a stack of different recipes I've settled on a cross between an average of them all, and the limitations of my abilities and equipment.

First I made a double boiler to make the heating process gentle. I started by putting a cake cooling rack into a large fryingpan. Next I drowned a large saucepan about half filled with two litres of pasteurized, but not homogenized milk. I brought the milk to around 30 °C (the water in the frying pan was sitting at around 55 °C). Then I added around 7 drops of my vegetarian rennet.

After sitting at mostly 28-30 °C (fluctuating between 32 °C and 27 °C) for one hour, I was utterly surprised to find I had set the curd.

I cut the curd (lumpy stuff) into 1 cm cubes 

I then stirred it for around 25 minutes at around 40 °C.

I collected it into a sieve.

Then placed it onto a piece of cotton cloth in a colander

I added a weight to press it (5 litres of water in milk bottles), and left for a half hour or so to squish out much of the remaining whey.

Leaving that aside, squishing, I brought the whey up to the boil (around 88 °C) and added a teaspoon of salt and about 3 table spoons of vinegar.

This curdles the whey into ricotta!

I poured it through a sieve lined with a cotton cloth to collect the cheese.

Ricotta can be eaten right away and it tastes great, but I'm going to take it to a dinner party I've been invited to tonight and see what less biased people think. In fact I think I'll take some haloumi as well.

That being done and my ricotta put in a tub and refrigerated, the next step is to unwrap the haloumi ...

and cut it into smaller sections...

then add it back to the simmering whey to cook for a half hour or so.

I see my haloumi has floated to the top of the whey. I'm not sure what that means so I'm frantically researching.


CONCLUSION: I don't think it means anything.

the end result from my 2 litres of milk was...


90 g ricotta (tastes like ricotta!)

280 g haloumi (no idea yet)

Cheese - Acidification

As far as I can tell, it's acidification that contributes to the coagulation of the proteins that make cheese cheesy.

Acetic acid in vinegar or citric acid in lemon juice can be added to milk to separate it into curds (lumpy bits) and whey (watery stuff). Another way is to introduce your milk to some miro-beasties like Lactococci bacteria. Lactococci, along with others including streptococci, lactobacilli (pictured), and propionibacter shermani, involve themselves with the milk sugars and turn them into lactic acid. It also seems these beasties and the enzymes they produce play a role in the final flavour of the aging cheese.

Like beer, wine and bread, cheese flavours change depending on the ambient temperatures the beasties find themselves growing in. This, and the amount of salt required as preservative when cheese making in a desert, leads to differences in cheese matured strapped to the side of a camel on the Arabian Peninsular when compared to say, one ripened in the cellar of a European monastery. All great food but potentially very different. There are probably many other things that influence flavour that I don't yet know about.

The holes in Swiss cheese are made by contemporary Swiss sculptor Gerald Hach as part of a long standing government tourism campaign.

Actually the holes in swiss cheese are a bi-product of carbon dioxide produced by the micro-beasty propionibacter shermani.

Cheese - Legend

It turns out cheese isn't complex magic after all.

Cheese is made from milk, and the interesting bits of milk are it's fat, and it's protein. Cheeses also often contains rennet. Rennet is found in young mammal stomachs. Which is odd because young mammals don't eat cheese. It seems the rennet acts on a protein called "casein" within the milk, causing it to coagulate. Perhaps the young mammals use it to digest milk.

Vegetarian rennet is made from some microbe or another.

As with many of the yummy things in life, I've read that monks are thanked for their input into making cheese as we know it, but before that it may have been discovered that if you milk a goat and store that milk in an animal stomach you get a cheese of sorts. Apparently, in the Middle East, there is a legend of a Nomad doing just this and discovering the beginnings of cheese. It's also possible that cheese was first discovered by me in the delicatessen section of a supermarket, but from my research I find fewer facts, and only one anecdote supporting this history.

Pictured here is our goat Granger. Granger is male, and as such, has no place in the legend of cheese other than having some rennet in his gut as a kid.

Cheese

Some years ago I tried my hand at home made cheese making. I put some vinegar into some milk. It curdled into something a bit like cheese. It tasted more like milk with a bit of vinegar added. But it looked a little like something that could one day become cheese.

I'm going to try to do a bit better this time. I'm going to make some real cheese. I'm going to learn words like gouda, pecorino, and maybe even camembert.

I have a lot to learn in order to catch up to the current state of the art.

I have quite a bit to read. It seems cheese goes back a while.

But I acquired some rennet and some starter culture. It seems I need rennet and starter culture. I don't know what rennet is but I suspect starter culture is like yeast or something.

I bought vegetarian rennet. Not because I'm a vegetarian, but because I don't know what rennet is. Now All I need is a cow.

I really need a cow.

I don't have a cow, but I know where some are.

And I can't help thinking that whoever invented cheese didn't just go and borrow some rennet and some starter culture from one of their cheese making buddies. I'll work that out later if it turns out to be important.

Good luck me!

Thanks!