Making cheese

The honey harvest is over, so it's time to turn my attention to a new skill: cheese making!

I have dabbled in this over the last few years, almost exclusively with making soft cheeses like chevre and mozzarella, but this weekend I wanted to revisit my nemesis: making cheddar cheese. My last (and only) attempt  several years ago was an unmitigated disaster. The curd didn't set right and the cheese fell apart when I pulled it out of the mold. I don't even think we were able to eat it because it was so dry.  Looking at the recipe today, I realize I didn't follow the directions very well when I attempted to make cheddar the last time around.  Ok. Fine. Fine. I didn't follow them at all, apparently.

My biggest mistake was that I tried to cook it on the stove instead of using a hot water bath. This, despite warnings that are all over (really, all over!) my cheese making book that clearly state that hard cheeses require a hot water method, and should never, not ever, oh my god are you kidding, not ever, be made on the stove. Right on the stove it went, because I already know how to do shit and plus I am pretty sure these warnings were not in my book five years ago. (Somebody should look into this thing of books quietly editing themselves on the bookshelf, no?  This is the same phenomenon that results in finding typos in my blog posts and grant reports weeks and months after I have already completed them, sans typos.) 

NOW, the book tells me that the stove produces uneven heat, and is much harder to control.  When the temperature of your milk has to be exact (like, say, at 86 degrees) the stove can't guarantee that you'll hit and maintain your target temperature. My next big mistake was using a poorly made cheese mold and cheese press.  The mold, which gives the cheese its shape, was home-made from materials I had around the house, and didn't hold the shape of the cheese.  The press I used didn't provide uniform pressure and so the whey wasn't squeezed from the curd effectively. Total fail.    

In hindsight, it was 100 percent user error (well, except for that whole book part.  Personally, I think it was kind of dodgy of the book to withhold the bit about using a hot water method for hard cheese and then slyly add it back in this time around. Amirite?)   But, I didn't see it that way back then.  I just decided that hard cheeses were better left to the experts, and that probably this book had crappy instructions. (Clearly.) Frustrated, and without time to figure out my mistakes since I was juggling a newborn and grad school at the time, I packed away all my cheese making gear and forgot about it until this weekend, when we were re-organizing the kitchen. Chris pulled out  my cheese wax and other supplies and asked if I was going to get back into it or if we could get rid of the stuff to free up cabinet space.

Challenge accepted. 

Buoyed by this year's success in beekeeping and soap-making and ready to pick up something new, I rolled up my sleeves.

The first step took a really, really long time for me.  The milk has to ripen, with the help of cultures and rennet, which introduce helpful little beasties into the milk to help the milk transform by expelling liquid whey from the solid curd.  I didn't take any pictures of it, but if you've ever seen a stockpot full of milk, you've got the image. It took me a long time because I had to figure out how to keep the surrounding water in the kitchen sink at the right temperature to maintain the necessary temperature (86 degrees) inside the pot.  It was always a little high or a little low, so it took a long time to get it right. 

Next comes the cooking part. For this cheese, I had to get the cheese up to 100 degrees veeeeeeeeeeeeery gradually, and then maintain that temp for a couple of hours.

Here is the cheese cooking process:

Slices of cheese cooking and slowly releasing more whey

Next, slicing it into cubes to release more whey:

Slicing the cheese into cubes

Back into the pot you go for even more cooking:

Cheese cubes

After cooking it for another 30 minutes and stirring it every ten minutes, it's time to salt it then press it. This is the mold that I broke down and purchased after my last failed attempt:

Cheese goes into the mold and is ready for pressing

This will press overnight:

Cheese being pressed to expel more whey from the curds

After 36 hours of pressing it looks like this:

Since this is traditional cheddar, after it air dries for a few days, I'll coat it with wax and age it for 3 to 12 months.  Cheese making is not a money saving exercise, unless you have your own cow.  It is also not fast, so if you want cheese now, you really should have thought of that three months ago. Come to think of it, I can't understand why sane people do this.

Except that homemade cheese is amazing.  Come visit me in a few months and we'll give it a try!