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 - Bouteille Cheese 2

It's probably worth mentioning at this stage, that if anyone out there reading this is trying it, you should stop. I have no Idea what I'm doing and at this is really just me expressing how impatient I get when my research-to-experimentation ratio doesn't fit my personality type. In other words sometimes I rush, in the company of fools. Basically if I stop blogging suddenly its because I'm spending a month in hospital getting a cheesectomy, due to the overwhelming colony of botchalism that's set up home in my gut.

That being said, I boiled water in the pot I'm using and sterilized a sieve, a large knife, and a plate to rest them on.

Next I put the bottle of milk that now smells slightly of fresh yogurt, with a hint of buttermilk, in a pot of 50 deg C water until it seemed as if it was also at 50 deg C.

The milk hadn't thickened as far as I could tell, but I think I could detect it starting to separate when I added the rennet. I read somewhere that your milk shouldn't have started to thicken when you add the rennet because you wont get a clean break. (a "clean break" is when you poke something into your curd, lift it, and the curd breaks rather than just sludging around, indicating your curd is of the correct firmness)

So the rennet is in the milk, and the milk is still in the bottle, and its all sitting at 50 deg C. At this stage the temptation to get it out of the bottle and into some kind of saucepan that would allow me to follow some instructions has me almost convinced. But, if I can do it all in a bottle, the issues of sterilization would all but disappear. Also it makes for a no mess, easy, child friendly way to make yet more cheese.

From time to time I'm adding some additional boiling water to the saucepan to maintain the temperature at around 50 deg C.

The rennet has been in for an hour, and unlike my haloumi, has failed to set very well. This could be because it had started to separate (see paragraph 4) before I added the rennet, because my temperatures were way too high(see paragraph 3), or simply because I have no idea. (see aquaponics, cheese, and solar hot water)

Its not looking so good, but I strained it out and have something that looks a bit like cottage cheese.

Pressing on regardless, we have this as the final result. It looks a bit like it could turn out to be a cheese, but be mindful of the fact that I've never seen a fresh cheese before. Only an enormous amount of time will tell.

By the time I've aged this for a bit to try and learn something about aging, I will have tasted it into oblivion.

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!