Cheesemaking – Beyond Kits

Admittedly, my skills making cheese has not really expanded my further than the DYI kits. I’m still making mostly fresh cheeses, though I have tried to expand into a slightly aged cheese.

As a child, we had for a short amount of time a Mexican worker. His wife would come and get raw cows milk from us and make queso, which I loved. Don’t get me wrong – the DYI queso blanco recipe is good, but it isn’t how I remembered our worker’s wife made it. Hunting online, I found this recipe, and I went and got some rennet, buttermilk, milk, and rennet to make it. Since I was already working with pasteurized milk, I just started making the cheese. The nice thing about it was that I didn’t need to heat it quite so much. However, it does require a second heating without stirring, which caused a bit of problems because I got different temperature readings from different locations in the pot. In the end, I got it to hot, but it still turned out tasting better than the DYI kit.

The other cheese I have attempted to make was a cow’s milk feta. I found some recipes online and tried twice, but they both failed to curdle. My local Clark County Goat Association had former commercial cheese maker Mary Rosenblum come give a demonstration on making feta and then ricotta from the left over whey. I learned a lot from her that day, and I went home and had my first success at making feta. Rosenblum also gives demonstrations at Kookoolan Farms in Yamhill, OR, and my regions Whole Foods Markets and Homebrew Exchange frequently give cheese making demonstrations. Look for classes in the Food Day section of the newspapers to find other classes. I highly recommend attending a cheese making class when moving beyond kits when making cheese.

How to Make Fresh Cheese Using Kits

I recently picked up two different cheese making kits for fresh cheese.

The first one I got from The Homebrew Exchange for making mascarpone. I had never even really looked into making cheese before I bought this kit, which ended up containing enough tartaric acid to make 30 batches, some cheese cloth, and instructions. It took about an hour to make, and the batch turned out very well when I did get around to making it because we had bought fresh strawberries. The mascarpone was actually better than the early cheap strawberries.

The other kit I bought was at the 16^th Annual Spring Beer & Wine Fest back and Tour de Cheese back in April from Urban Cheese Craft. I paid $15 for a queso blanco and paneer DYI Cheese Kit, in which the kit contained cheese cloth, cheese salt (AKA flaked salt), citric acid, and instructions. This kit is supposedly good for 10 batches, and all I have to do is buy whole milk after buying the kit. I have also seen their kits at Whole Foods Market, where I believe they have taught some classes. I made the queso blanco the same day I did the mascarpone, and it turned out a little bland due to me going a bit easy on the salt. I will note that as part of the instructions, it does say that if you run out of the citric acid, you can use vinegar to make queso blanco, so when I run out of the citric acid, I do not have to worry about finding more or buying it from them. I looked at the difference between paneer and queso blanco, and I saw very little difference between the two recipes, so I’ve just been sticking to making the queso blanco.

Both of these kits are good beginners kits, as the cheese cloth provided is good quality cheese cloth unlike what you might find in a grocery store. However, both kits called for an accurate thermometer to get the milk up to 185⁰. I did use a digital one that had been given to us as a gift, but later I purchased a better one that had a holder on the side of the pot from the Homebrew Exchange.

Different Styles of Cheeses

When it comes to classifications of cheeses, they are usually broken down into how firm they are, what kind of rind, and how they were allowed to ripen and age.

First off, the basic fundamental part of the cheese is knowing what kind of milk the cheese was made from. In Making Artisan Cheeses, Tim Smith describes cow’s milk as being the most common, with its creamy high moisture yield. Goat’s milk makes for smoother, softer cheeses than cow’s milk due to its smaller fat globules. Smith reasons that since sheep produce a smaller volume of milk than cows yet has the same total amount of solids, it makes for a denser cheese with an oil and butterfat that goes to the surface. Thing is, you can process all three milks the same way to make the same cheese, but they will all taste different.

The Cheese Companion by Judy Ridgway and updated by Sara Hill talk about cheeses in the sense of softness, rinds, cheesemaking process, and ripening process. I have supplemented some of their descriptions with information from the Cheese Primer by Steven Jenkins.

Softness

• Very Soft: 80% water and spoonable; includes most fresh cheeses
• Soft: 50-70% water and spreadable, including Brie and Camembert.
• Semi-hard: 40-50% water and sliceable with a slightly rubbery texture. Gouda is a good example.
• Semi-hard blue: crumbly or springy blue cheeses including Roquefort and Stilton
• Hard: 30-50% water and firm, perhaps slightly crumbly or dense cheese, including Cheddar, Gruyère, and Parmesan

Rinds

• White mold rinds: Cheeses which contain an outer rind of white mold that is edible. The mold is introduced either via exposure, or being sprayed on. Examples include Brie and Camembert.
• Washed rinds: a cheese that is washed in brine, wine, beer, or spirits to act as a food for bacteria, causing an orange-red rinded cheese that is soft.
• Dry Natural rinds: rinds in which the outer curds dried out. They are sometimes oiled. These rinds are not eaten. Examples include Stilton, Cheddar, and Emmental
• Organic Rinds: rinds of cheeses made from herbs or leaves.
• Artificial rinds: rinds made of ash, wax, or plastic.

Cheesemaking Process

• Fresh: Uncooked curds that are unripened or allowed to ripen only for a few days. Maybe be slightly pressed or molded, but most of the time just packed into tubs, so they are usually very moist and mild. Examples: Mascarpone and cream cheese
• Unpressed ripened cheese: Curds are cut up finely to allow whey to drain naturally. They maybe be quick-ripened with surface molds or bacteria, or slow-ripened with starter cultures for one to three months. Examples: Brie, Camembert, and Stilton
• Pressed ripened cheese: cheese that are lightly or heavily pressed before ripening for two to eighteen months. Example: Cheddar
• Cooked, Pressed, and ripened cheese: The curds are heated in the whey before drained, molded, and heavily pressed, and possibly aged for up to four years. Examples: Gouda, Parmesan, Gruyère, and Emmental
• Pasta Filata cheese: cheeses in which the curds are cooked and then kneaded and stretched before shaping. They can be eaten fresh or allowed to ripen. Examples: Mozzerella and Provolone.

Ripening Process

• Soft cheeses: ripened at lower temperatures from the outside in quickly, such as mold rind. They tend to be semisoft.
• Washed rind: a cheese that is washed in brine, wine, beer, or spirits to act as a food for bacteria, causing an orange-red rind cheese that is soft.
• Natural-rind cheeses: self-formed rinds; no microflora or molds and no washing are used to create their thin exteriors. They are denser in texture than other cheeses and usually aged longer.
• Blue cheese: a cheese that has been pierced with metal skewers to introduce oxygen into the interior of the cheese, which causes it to mold.
• Hard cheeses: ripened at higher temperatures from the inside out slowly. They may be covered in oil or rapped in bandages.

Additional Readings:

• Artisanal Premium cheese – Cheese Types
  
• Laura Werling – Understanding Cheese: The Eight Basic Styles of Cheese
• Laura Werling – Understanding Cheese: Cheeses by Category