After heating the milk to 90F I tried to see if I could keep the temperature there by turning the stove to its absolute lowest. Unfortunately this appears to have kept heating the milk until it reached 100F. At this point I just took the milk right off the stove and just let it sit. I am a little concerned because I have already added the culture which means I may have killed the bacteria that makes the cheese. We will see.
I have to say, I really like the cook book stand. I have used it earlier when making a mushroom soup and now with the cheese and it works fairly nicely. I still have to crease the spine of the cheese book because it was much thinner than my other cook books and was curling more but hey, books are meant to be used.
Time to go and add the rennet. Be back in a jiffy.
Rennet is it, unfortunately the temperature is still really close to 100F. Lets hope that it will form correctly.
One thing I should mention is that I am actually using 2 different types of milk. Yesterday I picked up a back of 3.25% homogenized Irrestables milk, and then this afternoon when I started making the cheese I saw how little the culture was and really didn't want to try and split it in half so I asked Talia to pick up another bag of Lactantia brand milk.
Now to wait another 45 minutes to see how it turns out.
So after 45 minutes I checked for a clean break like the recipe says and sadly it didn't look particularly good. Next time I think I have to add a little more rennet.
Despite that I went on to the next step which is to cut the curds and then slowly heat them using hot water until it gets to 100F.
The concern in this step was that the curds were already at 100F or very close to it. I stirred the curds around in while the pot sat in hot tap water and I did see the whey separate somewhat but not nearly as much as when I have made mozzarella in the past.
After heating it for 10 minutes or so I poured the curds and whey into a colander with the cheese cloth and wrapped the ends together..
Now the curds have to drip for about an hour until they stop dripping and then its pressing time. In order to drip I simply grabbed a dowel and put it over the large pot I used to heat the milk
To be continued in about 1 hour :)
So how that the cheese has drained for about 1 hour I had to break it apart and salt it. After salting it was time to press the cheese. That was were things started to get difficult.
Initially I thought that I could just weigh it down with barbell but that didn't really work. Thankfully Talia came to the rescue and figured out something that would work for 10lb and then 20lb but when we got to 50lb thats when we started having fears of sleepless nights.
My version of the 10lb weight but this didn't stay up long
Talia's 10lb solution. This worked out quite nicely.
Talia's 20lb solution. The cheese mold was put into a colander and a flat pot lid was put on that. Then 10lb were ,hung from each side of the stick.
For the 50lb Talia was worried that the pot lid could be damaged so we didn't want to set it up this way.
First we tried flipping the pot and putting it on top of the cheese mold.
This had us all scared to go to sleep. so after about 10 minutes we decided to try another tactic. In this version I put the cheese mold into one large planter pot and then put the second planter pot on top of that and filled the upper pot with lots and lots of weights.
Now it has to stay there for 12 hours. My next purchase WILL be a cheese press.
Edit: After searching around the web for a bit I think that I will be making this type of cheese press. I may even be able to make it tomorrow if the dollar store is open and I can pick up some cutting boards.
Edit: Monday morning. Just a quick update, this is what the cheese looked like when it came out of the press this morning. Now it has been turned over and will come out tonight at 20:30 to start drying and forming its rind
~(' ')~
No comments:
Post a Comment