Monday Laundry Day also turned into Cheddar Mak’in Day. Because I am at home all day doing laundry, and making cheese demands just that, I thought they’d go hand in hand. For eight weeks now I have been making a 2 or 3lb loaf of cheddar on Mondays. They age for 1-6 months. We have now sampled our first loaf of cheese and to my surprise it tasted….like…cheddar! For some reason I wasn’t expecting that. At four weeks our cheddar is a little dryer and a little sharper than our store bought mild cheddar, which I loooove.
Here we go. Empty 3 gallons worth of fresh raw goat’s milk into a large stainless pot. Each gallon of whole milk yields 1 lb of cheese. Heat the milk to 85 degrees…slowly, in a double boiler. I take a water bath canner, put three rocks in the bottom to make my DB.
Once at 85, remove and inoculate with mesophillic starter. Cover with a lid and towels to allow the milk to ripen for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes the milk looks the same. Add rennet. Rennet is the liquid that makes all milk curdle in the belly of baby mammals, in this case, I use calf rennet. I was grossed out at first when I learned this, but it is how it works.
Cheese was discovered near the beginning of time by storing milk in a bag made of the intestine of a calf. The rennet miraculously caused the milk to curdle and with aging, caused cheese!
See it curdling? After adding the rennet I stir in an up and down motion, make sure we are still at 85 degrees, then wrap her all up in towels again and let sit for 1 hour.
The fun part! Remove the pot lid and hope and pray that the you can cut curd! If you can’t, you just ruined a pot of cheese, if you can, you are ready to make cheddar.
Ooo, oooo, the curd cut. See that nice cut? Perfecto.
Cutting the curd takes time. You cut it this way, then that, then sideways, then reverse until the whole pot is cut in 1/2 inch pieces. Place the lid back and on let it sit for 10minutes. We are allowing the whey to escape the curds. Miss Muffet, where are you?
Then the curds are gradually heated again to 98 degrees this time, no more than two degrees every 5 minutes. Hold the temp(wrap the pot back up) and let sit for 45 minutes.
Place butter muslin over a colander and strain the curd, preserving the whey for later. Beautiful curd!
Gently stir in 3 t Real Salt or an un-iodized salt.
Line the cheese press with butter muslin or a high quality cheese cloth. place the curds in the mold. Set up and press at 20lbs of pressure for 15 minutes. Take it out, flip the cheese over, redress it and press at 30lbs pressure for 1 hour. Take it out, flip it, redress and now do a final press of 50lbs for 12 hours. Jessie called me on the phone to let me know I’ll be take my cheese out of the press at 3am. I really need to plan better.
Hunk-O-Cheese
Now Jessie’s favorite part. After the cheddar is in final press, pour aaaaaall your whey back in the pot. Since the temp of our milk never went over 98 degrees there is still cheese left in the whey. Now we are going to heat up the whey to 200 degrees and force out the ricotta.
At 190 ricotta starts to form and bubble to the surface. Oh the joy! Grab the salt shaker and a spoon.
The yield was about 3C of blessed ricotta. Had we not already taken cheese from the milk and used whole milk our yield would have been 3lbs.
I keep 2 qrt of my whey and use it in place of water in bread baking(I let it ferment a smidge). I am learning to ferment raw whey for 1 month to culture my own mozzarella instead of having to buy a culture, we’ll see how that goes. Fermenting raw milk products is safe, whereas pasteurized milk just rots, stinks and becomes poisonous.
This is Day 1. It will now take two days of salting and drying the cheddar to build a rind. After the rind is thick and the cheese stops sweating whey, we’ll brush it with a good 1/16” coat of cheesewax. On Day 3, we will label and put it in the cheese fridge to age for at least 4-6wks.
You can make your own cheese with a gallon of whole milk and vinegar or lemon juice, anyone interested in a recipe?
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