Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Fromage Blanc Take Two

 


Gaze upon my cheese.



I followed the same directions as Sarah except that I only used 1/2 a gallon of whole milk. I let my culture develop in the Yogotherm for about 26 hours (do to my work schedule, not based on the cheese.) Even with that amount of time, I didn't have very solid curds. It was more like yogurt consistency. I didn't want to leave it longer so I went ahead and spooned it into a butter muslin lined strainer and let it drain away. I ended up with about 5 cups of whey and one cup of cheese. I don't know what happened to the other 2 cups of liquid. I assume that it soaked into the muslin. I let it drain for about 6 hours. At one point, I got impatient and squeezed out the whey. That seemed to move things along, but I believe that it make the cheese much harder to get off the cloth. Any suggestions for that? Also, how do you clean it? I ended up rinsing it in water for a long time.

Any hoo. My cheese was pretty firm - like cream cheese. It's pretty tasty, although I only just tasted it, I haven't used it in anything. It tastes pretty similar to the yogurt cheese.


 


Cheese making debris.


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3 comments:

Sarah said...

Did you get anything resembling my orange bloom? Was your whey relatively clear? Did you dump the whole contents of the Yogotherm into your muslin-lined sieve or did you just scoop out curds? Did capillary action lead your muslin to leak whey all over your counter? I used a silicone scraper to get the cheese off the muslin. I ran the muslin through the washing machine with my napkins and dishtowels.

Supposedly this is less fatty than cream cheese. What are you going to make out of it?

Rebecca said...

I didn't get an interesting bloom on my cheese. But, it's also been winter here and I'm not sure that there's much that's alive.

I started to scoop into the muslin, but gave up and just dumped it all in. I didn't have any leakage onto the counter, but I pulled up the edges and placed them on top, so there wasn't anything hanging over the edge of the bowl.

I have no idea how we are going to eat it yet. The yogurt cheese that I made was eaten as cream cheese with pepper jelly on crackers.

I will wash the muslin with towels, but it was pain to get the cheese off - it was in little crevices. I think that due to my squeezing the cheese in the cloth. The scrapper is a good idea - I should try that next time.

Sarah said...

"I didn't get an interesting bloom on my cheese." That's such a nice way to say, "My kitchen sanitation skills are not that of a chimpanzee, unlike yours."

I gave up on scooping and dumped it all in, too. Seems to work out just as well.

I read in 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes by Debra Amrein-Boyes in her tips for Fromage Blanc, "If you're using homogenized cow's milk, it is strongly recommended that you add calcium chloride . . . [to] stabilize the curd, hasten the setting, and increase yield." So maybe that's why your milk didn't separate neatly into curds and whey. I used unhomogenized milk . . . but that doesn't explain why the my milk in the bowl set better than the milk in the Yogotherm. Hmm . . . do you have access to calcium chloride?