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

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.