Master Recipe for Simple, Hard Cheese

Master Recipe for Simple, Hard Cheese
This recipe is still going through major edits, so there may be substantial changes in the future based on testing and feedback.

Preface
This is a recipe for a hard cheese without the need for a press. The way around needing a cheese press is actually quite simple, the cheese is tightly wrapped in cheese cloth and weight is added on top of it. This effectively simulates a press, and has it's advantages and disadvantages.

The main advantage is cost. Cheese presses either cost money or they cost a pretty good amount of time to build one. And if you are new the cheese making, it is usually the single biggest roadblock, so in this sense it is a reasonable trade off. The major disadvantage is the cheese loaf made with this technique will not look as nice as one made in a press. It will be flatter, and probably don't have a consistent shape. But if you are using the cheese for cooking/slicing and don't intend on winning any aesthetic awards, then it's still a good option.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon of 2% milk, not ultra homogenized and also not organic. Conventional, homogenized, pasteurized 2% milk
• 2 cups of 1% cultured buttermilk. It is essential it is cultured
• 1 tablespoon non iodized salt. Mortons Kosher salt works very well, but if you use Kosher salt you may need to add more
• Rennet

Hardware

• Cheese cloth
• Colander
• Cookie sheet or wide pan with a tall edge
• 10 lbs weight
• Pot that can hold 1 and 1/2 gallons of liquid

Calcium Chloride is an optional ingredient for store bought milk. This additive adds additional calcium to the milk that is lost during the commercial milk production cycle. It makes the curd firmer and can slightly improve texture in low calcium milk.


1. Pour off two cups of the 2% milk. You can drink this, put it on your cereal, or just save it. Add two cups of buttermilk to the 2% container, and put the jug back into the fridge. You should now have a gallon container of 2% milk that has had two cups of buttermilk added. The purpose of this step is to introduce the good bacteria from the buttermilk and let them take hold in the gallon of milk.

2. Twelve to 24 hours later remove from fridge, and place in your sink. Turn on your tap and fill the sink that has the jug of milk with water. Ideally if you have a thermometer it should be 88F/31C. This feels a little warmer than room temperature, and would definitely not be described as warm or hot. Let the jug rest in the water for an hour, let the water out, and repeat that step. The reason to repeat the step is invariably the water surrounding the jug will have gotten colder, and we want to get the temperature back up to 88F. Let it rest for another hour, this is allowing the bacteria that gives cheese flavor a chance to grow.

3. Pour the milk into the pot that can hold at least 1 and 1/2 gallons of liquid, and add the rennet according to the instructions on the package. Usually it says to add the rennet to about a quarter cup of water, then add that to the milk. This is done to prevent clumping (think of lumpy gravy, same sort of thing).

4. Wait an hour, test for clean break. You do this by sticking your clean finger in the milk and pulling it out like a claw. If the milk behaves similar to Jello, you are ready to procede to the next step. If it acts like pudding, then wait another hour. A clean break is critical to making cheese, otherwise none of the next steps will work.

5. Cut the curd with a long knife, carefully, so the entire curd is cut into walnut sized lumps. You can slightly agitate the pot while doing this to keep them seperate, but what you want to avoid is mixing up the whey that is coming out of the curd with the curd itself.

6. Gently stir the curds in the whey, then start ladling off the whey. You can also pour the whey off, just be careful not to pour off any of the curd. You can save the whey for baking, feed it to animals, or just dispose down the sink.

After about half the whey is gone, add 1/2 gallon of luke warm (90F/33C) tap water to the walnut sized curds. This is done to remove some of the lactose so it doesn't get super sour/sharp. Also, the hotter the water you add, the drier the cheese will end up.

7. Once most of the whey has been ladled or poured off, break up curds with your clean hand into bean sized lumps. Place those in a colander (strainer) in the sink and let them drain for half an hour or so.

8. Sprinkle salt on the curds and mix thoroughly. Taste a small piece of the curd, it should taste as salty as cheddar cheese. If it doesn't taste very saltly, once you have verified the curd was mixed well, add more salt. Cheese with low salt content spoils very quickly and can make you ill, it is not a matter of flavor necessarily it is a matter of food safety.

10. Place the drained and salted curds on the cheese cloth, then take the four edges and wrap it into a very tight ball. You can use this time to squeeze out some of the whey with your hands as well, but the important thing is to make the ball as tight as you can. This will prevent the cheese from being completely flattened during the pressing.

11. Put the wrapped curd on a cookie sheet with the twisted end down. Place a cutting board on top, and give it a good push with your hand. If it goes too flat or comes undone, take the cutting board off and re-twist it.

When you can press pretty hard on the wrapped curd, then place 10 lbs of weight on it and let it press over night, or for about 12 hours. If there is a lot of whey in the cookie sheet, you can take the whey off and dump it in the sink.

12. After it has been pressed, remove it from the cheese cloth and let it air dry for two days. Flip it over twice a day, and on the third day coat it with a thin layer of vegetable oil or vegetable shortening and tightly wrap it with clean cheese cloth. You want every square millimeter you possible can to be touching the cloth, this will inhibit bad molds from growing on the surface.

The last step is the hardest, waiting. Find the coolest place in your home and stash it there, for two weeks at least. If you can get a place that is 50F/10C that would be ideal, but do not put it in your fridge. Your cheese will not develop into cheese if it goes into the fridge, it will remain curd.

After one day of drying
Notice it is quickly starting to develop a 'rind', or dryer outer layer. Since we want the rind to be even around the whole loaf, flip it once or twice a day. You can see the 'bottom' part in the first photo here, it is still moister and lighter than the 'top'. This must be evened out if we want it to age correctly and not spoil.

The time needed to dry the loaf adequately has mainly to do with how thick the loaf was and how humid your storage location is. Some higher moisture cheeses will take longer, but in the case of a pressed, semi thin cheese like this one, it shouldn't take more than perhaps a week. Two to three days has been sufficient for many people.

Aging
For the first few days, keep a close eye on it. If it starts to 'weep', that is expel droplets of moisture, dry it off with some clean paper towels and apply a small amount of oil or shortening to the moist area. Continue this process until it stops weeping.

I find a good place to age is an a small, cool cupboard with a glass of water next to the loaf. The water is to keep the humidity higher so it doesn't dry out too much.

IT IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT TO LET YOUR CHEESE AGE! Do not be tempted to taste it at this point. It will taste awful. This style of cheese will take close to two months to develop any real flavor, which means you must be patient. Please see this post and it's links for more info on just how important this step is.

Why make cheese every day?

The last couple years I have become intensely interested in fermented foods, mostly because they are delicious, but also because of the sense of satisfaction when they are done right. Unlike simply cooking or baking, fermentation is almost alchemical. While many can follow a recipe or even improvise while cooking, many are lost when it comes to fermenting food. Most people do not understand why the fermentation processes take place, what makes fermentation successful, and how to control fermentation for taste/texture/aroma.

I first started experimenting with fermentation with home brewing about eleven years ago. Back then a friend and I would make extract batches of beer that turned out (for the most part) surprisingly well. However it was the failures that I think intrigued me the most. One batch we made smelled and tasted like lighter fluid. Another had fruity/malty flavors that down out everything else. Others were 'stuck'--they fermented for awhile, then abruptly stopped before they were done.

After lots of reading and experimenting, brewing beer has become pretty easy. You learn what you absolutely must do to prevent problems (heat break, cold break, lots and lots of oxygen in the wort, yeast starters, etc.), what you absolutely must not do (pitch yeast when the wort is still 150F, primary fermentation in a carboy on the carpet), and how to troubleshoot problems as they come up (temperature, temperature, temperature).

Six or seven years ago the wife and I moved into an apartment, so I mostly stopped brewing. Brewing in a small apartment with a tiny stove isn't all that much fun, so I found a new hobby, baking bread. The first couple years baking I definitely had more failures than successes, since I really didn't understand what was happening in the dough. While I was adding yeast to flour, I didn't really think of it as 'fermentation', I just thought it was how to make the dough rise. I had a kind of schism between the experiences I had with brewing and baking, and while there are plenty of differences, the similarities (as I would discover later) are striking. The main problem I had was I thought the failures were due to an ingredient missing, not a technique missing.

My eyes were really opened when I bought Pepin's Complete Technique. Even though I bought it for the pictures and discussion of cooking technique, it was the first couple pages talking about baking lean hearth breads that really opened my eyes--i.e., *only* using flour, water, salt, and yeast, while baking the loaf at temperatures I had never set my oven to before (500-550F). After a couple of false starts I realized that the previous attempts hadn't been failures of the ingredients, but failures due to me not knowing what the hell I was doing. Not enough water, not letting the dough really rise, rising it at too high of a temperature, and baking at too low of a temperature. Once I had these fundamental problems figured out, I finally started baking passable loaves. Not great, but not an embarrassment.

Over the years, with the help of the Bread Bakers Apprentice, eGullet, and Dan Lepards wonderful forums I feel very comfortable with fundamentals such as bakers percentages, dough retarding, starch conversion, wild yeasts (sour dough), and all the other fiddly bits that go with bread baking. So, while I am not a great baker, I have internalized the whole process and can bake fantastic baguettes, boules, pizzas, sourdough, multigrain, and many other types or styles.

So at this point in my life, I feel quite comfortable with brewing all grain beer and baking a wide variety of yeast based breads. With the lessons I've learned based on the similarities between the two domains, I decided it was a good time to really concentrate on something I've been playing with but never really invested time in to--making cheese.

There has been a cheese mold and press with me for a number of years and I've toyed around with pressing hard cheeses, but I never really knew what I was doing. But a couple weeks ago I decided that enough was enough, I know I can do this well, so it's time to invest a little time to get it right. With that in mind, I've decided to make a loaf of cheese ~5 days a week for the foreseeable future. This will allow me to experiment, take notes, compare loaves over time, and really solidify the missing techniques I need to make a good, tasty cheese.

The world of fermented foods is vast, even when you narrow it down to a certain sub-selection. There are dozens of recognized styles of beer, and probably more recognized styles of fermented grape juice (wine :D ). There are hundreds of styles of breads, uncountable styles of pickles, and the same goes for cheeses. It is incredible to see the myriad of cheese available in many supermarkets these days--from regionally protected cheese such as Roquefort (self proclaimed king of cheese!), Camembert, Wendleysdale (Wallace and Gromit!) to styles produced by virtually every creamery.

With that in mind, the cheeses I have been attempting to make, explore, and understand at pressed, sharp cheeses without secondary inoculations. This includes cheese such as cheddar, provolone, colby, and many others. I feel that getting a handle on the basic techniques required for these styles will set me up for understanding more complex cheeses such as swiss/Emmentaler/gruyere, blue, and parmesean/romano/asiago.

This project officially started on the 25th of February 2009. While half a dozen loaves had been fermented in the January (the month before this project started), at least half of them were failures. Some of them never developed an attractive flavor, some of them had textural problems such as excessive sponginess, and others were just too difficult to press due to the curds whey content. It was because of this inconsistency that I really became motivated to understand what was going right and what was going wrong. Two that end, I have been testing and formulating Master Recipes, to help the beginning cheesemaker, like myself, to be able to make a great product as quickly as possible.

And for now, cheers.