Making Cheese

My best friend gave me a cheese making kit for Christmas!  She sent me the Camembert kit from CottageCrafts.  The kit contained:

2 Camembert hoops

2 pieces of cheesecloth

A 3ml pipette

Camembert starter culture

P. Candidum culture

A cooking thermometer with clip

Vegetable rennet

Wraps for camembert

Instruction booklet (includes a couple of other cheeses)

Iodine based solution for sterilisation with its own pipette

I read through the instructions and saw that it takes a month to cure so instead of having some camembert ready for her visit for New Years (she lives in Australia), I decided to make it with her when she came to stay with us.  We waited until the New Year’s party (a large regular event for us) was over and done with and we were all sufficiently recovered from it. 

She was quite surprised when I said I hadn’t watched any of the cheese-making clips on youtube, I’d just read a few instructional books and articles.  I’m glad that she had watched these clips - some parts of the process, I think, are easier when you’ve seen how others do it and there were a few times when I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to look like that.

Camembert

4 litres of milk was raised to 32 deg Celsius and 1/16th of a tsp of starter culture and the tip of a pointy knife of P. Candidum culture added.  The tip of a pointy knife wouldn’t fit inside the small tube, so it became the tip of a bamboo skewer twice. Left to sit for 30 mins.

2ml of rennet in 20 mls of cooled boiled water was added and it was left to sit for another 45 mins. Fortunately, through watching the youtube clips, my friend was able to tell me when it was ready - when it’s set, a cut will make a ‘clean break’ and separate.  Cut the curd into 2cm cubes.  Again the youtube clips helped - cutting down in two ways in a 10 litre stock pot (up and down and sideways) was easy, but how to do the cuts through the depth? I had thought I’d be turning it out onto a board and cutting it (yeah, that would never have worked). The trick to it is to angle your knife and make cuts from the top to the side of the pot, going around in quarters.  Difficult to describe, but simple if you see it done.  While the recipes all say cubes, they’re never perfect, even cubes.  Let sit for 5 mins.

Turn the curds.  Well, the top layers were nice cubes but at the bottom it was a bit different.  Here’s where I was looking at it wondering if I’d done it wrong.  Underneath, the stuff that was coming on top with the turning looked more like watery cottage cheese.  But this is fine.

Curds turned twice more at 10 minute intervals.  Drain off a third of the whey and replace with the same amount of cooled boiled water.  Draining off the whey wasn’t as easy as it sounded.  We poured cupfuls through cheesecloth and returned the curds caught in the cloth to the pot.

Turn the curds twice more at 10 minute intervals.  Drain off half the whey and ladle curds into the sterilised hoops.  The recipe said to have the hoops sitting on a draining tray covered with a sushi mat and then cheesecloth.  We weren’t quite sure what we were going to use for this, I don’t have sushi mats for a start.  My dehydrator trays worked brilliantly and I have a large bowl that the tray was able to sit over.  The curds filled the two hoops, looking somewhat like cottage cheese at this point.

After nearly a day in the hoops

The curd filled hoops are inverted at intervals, using another cloth lined tray and left overnight - basically to roughly 24 hours after starting. Then removed from hoops and soaked in a 20% brine mixture for an hour.  Here’s another point where we stopped.  20% brine?  1 cup of salt to 1 litre of water.

Dry cheese on a rack for another 24 hours.  Then stored for 10 days to ripen at 11-15 degrees. The cheese needs to be turned every two or three days. I figure that our little scullery room that doesn’t get any direct sunlight should work for this.  The hard part will be keeping it safe from flies and dust but still able to let the air at it.  Then wrapped in foil (the wraps that came with the pack) and stored for another week at 11-15 degrees.  Ready to eat after three to four weeks.  We haven’t gotten to this part yet, we’ve only just brined the cheese.  I will do an update when we have.  I am enjoying watching a large amount of milk turn into two small cheeses though.

Hubby looked at our two small hoops filled with curds and asked how much milk had gone into it.  Disbelief was expressed (and not politely) and costs were questioned - whether this was cheaper than just buying camembert.  So we did the maths.  That day, I’d bought two small camembert wheels - $4 each for 110g cheeses.  This kit was supposed to make two 250g cheeses - so we were looking at $16 (plus some) worth of cheese.  Two litres of milk is somewhere between $3.50 and $4.50 depending on where you buy it, so we were clearly making a saving.  He was content with that.

Some of the whey

We had saved all the whey that we’d drained off.  There was a ricotta recipe that uses whey in the instruction booklet and I’d recently seen an article in the December 2012 issue of the Lifestyle Block magazine that had uses for whey.  One said to use the whey within one hour of draining it off and the other said within two hours, so once we’d poured the curds into the hoops I started to heat the 2 1/2 litres of whey that we already had.

Ricotta

Once the whey had reached approx 60 degrees celsius, we added milk and salt - the recipes vary a little here.  One had 5 litres of whey, two cups of milk and 1 tsp of salt.  The other didn’t specify how much whey, only one cup of milk and no salt.

Ricotta hanging

We heated the whey up to 95 and added diluted vinegar (40ml vinegar in 200ml water).  Both recipes mentioned white vinegar, but I had none of this.  A little time spent on Google told us that many cheese makers use apple cider vinegar with no noticeable difference to the cheese, so that was what we used.  As soon as the curd starts forming stop adding vinegar.  Let it sit for five minutes and put into a colander lined with cheese cloth.  The youtube clips came in handy here too.  Different from both recipes was to hang the cloth to let it all drain properly.

We still had some whey left over so I wanted to try something else I’d seen in the magazine article. 

Gjetost (also known as Mysost)

Gjetost is a Norwegian sweet cheese - pronounced Yay-toast according to one of the websites we went looking at this morning.

Basically this is made by simmering the whey down to a fudge-like consistency and pouring it into a greased pan (like fudge) and cooling quickly.  As I write this, I’ve started simmering the whey.  I may even do this one twice - once with the whey that has come straight from the camembert and once with the leftover whey from making ricotta - whey from whey cheese.  I don’t know if the whey from the ricotta will be useful, but I’d rather try it and find out than tip it down the sink.

My first batch of Gjetost is done.  One litre of whey makes about half a cup of this.  Mine didn’t brown and I’m wondering if I took it off too early.  I was just a little disturbed when there was no liquid left in the pan and just some slightly off-white stuff - looked more like coconut ice than fudge to be honest.  It tastes similar at the moment to Barfi(sp) a Hindi sweet treat I was given a few times at Diwali.  Actually, if I recall correctly, Barfi is made from milk and sugar.  This lacks the aftertaste I’m guessing whatever causes this went into the curds.

Some discussion and thought has raised the suggestion that I didn’t actually simmer it.  I kept it on a very low setting and didn’t see any bubbles rising at all.  We’ve turned the heat up on the second batch to see if it makes a difference.  We also looked on some cheese making forums and found quite a useful discussion on gjetost.  In this forum, someone said that the only reason you don’t boil it is that it will make it scorch.

Second batch was no good.  This was using the leftover whey after making ricotta.  Two litres simmered down without thickening or going brown and when my back was turned for only five minutes it burned.

We’re also wondering if the problem came from having left the whey overnight before making the gjetost.  Perhaps it should have been made immediately like the ricotta.

We ran out of cheese cloths, with so many things going at once so a new unopened packet of chux-style cloths came out.  I’ve used these for straining all sorts of things and find that as long as they’re new and haven’t been used for anything else, they’re great.  After straining a jelly or in this case cheese through them, they can be washed and used for cleaning.