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

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!