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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.
3 comments:
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?
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.
"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?
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