Cheesemaking 101-What I did today

That is very impressive. And fun too!

Very interesting and how nice of your boss to allow you to do this! When we were in Italy a couple of years ago,we visited a cheese-making factory and they gave a demonstration, not as extensive as yours. One of the things I remember most was the aging processes where they used different materials in the barrels with the cheese, the oddest being tobacco leaves. Afterwards they served several different kinds of cheese with slices of fennel, bread and of course wine at long tables set up on a really nice terrace.

By the way, have you read Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? It's about a year of total life change living, off what they grew or what they were able to get locally. She talked about making mozzarella and include the instructions.. I have a feeling you've been living that lifestyle for many years. It was an enjoyable read. Thanks for the pictures, as always they're great!

jude

Correction on the name of the book. It's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle". Sorry 'bout that.

I'm so glad you reported back. I logged on this AM to check out the scoop. Do I detect some dairy cows in your future? A cute little Jersey maybe?

Jude, Betsy suggested the same book, I haven't read it yet, it's on my "list of things to do" along with "Omnivore's Dilemma".

My boss didn't "allow" me to take the class, LOL, she's the County Prosecuting Attorney, I'm her assistant. It's the paying job that supports my bad farming habit and I pretty much do as I please. My secretaries tell people I answer to Chrystal and God, but that's all. (grin)

It had nothing to do with work, we were good friends before she became my boss and have remained so. I signed up first, mentioned that I was going to do it and she got excited and came along! Now she's all excited to take that next class on the hard cheeses.

I got her interested in natural and organic food by giving her organic free range chicken eggs, they are so much better than those pale imposters at the grocery store. Hhusband eats beef, although she doesn't, so she's exploring the grass fed beef option.

It was fun, and very informative, and much easier and faster than I thought. Temperature is crucial but as long as you pay attention, it's easy. No walking away to answer the phone, though.....

Annie

How fun!!! I think that would be so fun to try making your own cheese...

Linda

Annie, I am so envious! In western Mass. there's a woman, known as the Cheese Queen, who has been offering similar classes for years. The distance would mean an overnight stay for me, and I just haven't been able to justify it.

My DS & his fiancee are chemists, and when they were pursuing their PhD's in California -the land of "happy cows" - they had an opportunity to visit some great creameries (and wineries...) They were intrigued with the process of cheesemaking and bought some basic supplies and taught themselves to make simple cheeses. They enjoyed doing it, and their cheeses were always a hit when they brought or served them to friends.

Thanks for sharing. I'm eager to hear more when you take the hard cheese course.

Came by to see the pics! Now that looks like a good time, Annie! Where's a pic of you in your little shower cap? So you didn't cut the cheese? LOL!

I'm pretty jealous, that's one class I have always wanted to take! That cream cheese on the cracker looks so good!

Thanks for sharing all the details, pictures and book recomendation. I enjoy reading Barbara Kingsolver. I would love to take a cheese class, I will be looking for one in my area. I have played with making ricotta, & mozarella with good results, but would love to know more.

That's how Annie keeps her job, she makes sure her boss is well fed!
:)

Annie, this was very interesting. I do have a milk cow, but she is a milking shorthorn and her butterfat content isn't nearly as high as a Jersey. I just made cottage cheese this week and have made mozzarella a couple of times.

I should milk her more often and make more, but let the two calves do that job for me in between milkings. I just milk her 3 times a week for just the two of us.

That's extremely cool! Thanks so much for writing it up.

It looks great Annie. Wish I could have joined you! And thanks for posting all the great photos and info.

Stacy

What a great experience..I need to investigate that option of one of the dairies/cheese places doing the same.

Annie :
Nice to do the Cheese Class. Are you going to an Advanced
Class ?
Then we can put some kind of a label on you.

I don't think you need a Jersy to make the cheese ???
I always wanted to know the difference in making the Provolone with just a slight sharpiness.
Does she adjust the Citric Acid according to the time of year the milk is used?
Or is it the aging.

The Prov and Mozz I have now is hard to detect any difference in taste.
Boar's Head slicing Provolone has the slight sharp taste that I use in Hoagies and Pizza.
Lou

Wow, what fun!

I love making things from scratch, and this would be right up my alley!

That looks so interesting and like so much fun! You inspired me to check into cheesemaking workshops in my area, and I found a place that's giving weekend classes from now till March. I'm signing up! Thanks for sharing this experience.

Fantastic! Looks like so much fun. I bookmarked Manjula from Manjula's kitchen on youtube making homemade Paneer. Another thing to add to your repertoire there Annie!

That's a good idea, Gina, I was surprised at how easy it was to make mozzarella. I've never had paneer, homemade or otherwise, and I think my next experiment will be making feta, Ashley loves it. Now I have to look up paneer and see what the heck it is and how I could use it. I've been making my own yogurt for a couple of years now, and that's easy too, so it was time to branch out.

Lou, I don't know the difference in making provolone and mozzarella, I'll ask Jesse when I take that next class.

godno1, I think the milk from your shorthorn would be just fine for cheese. The butterfat makes a difference in butter and the cream cheese, but I think cream from any milk would be fine, you might get a smaller amount or a lesser yield, but I don't think it would be a problem at all.

maureen, I think you'll like the class, have fun.

Stacy, I wish I could have taken you and Carol both along, LOL, but then we'd probably have been disruptive and maybe not learned as much. (grin)

Carol, of course that's how I keep my job. I feed the boss. (grin) As a double bonus, I signed up and hadn't sent my check, when she signed up she paid for both of us!

As you know, I'm not a big fan of pizza but I figured I could put pizza dough into the bread machine and have mozzarella made by the time the dough was ready. No red sauce for me, but maybe some good olive oil, garlic, lots of veggies and that fresh mozzarella. That sounds pretty good...

Annie

Thx for sharing -- very informative & looks like alot of fun.

Annie: did they show how to make cheese curds in your class? I am addicted to Wisconsin cheese curds when I can find them here in NM but really stock up on them when visiting back 'home' in Wisconsin & NE Iowa!

Wow! That looks like so much fun! I can certainly see you getting a little girl cow for milk down the road (wink).

Good luck with the Feta experiement and keep us posted.

Alexa

Nope, no cow. I milked cows when I was in high school. Twice a day. Every day. No matter if you were sick or it was Christmas or you wanted to go on vacation. Gotta be milked twice a day, every day.

Now, I'm not afraid of commitment, but that's just too much commitment for me!

vieja, they did not show me how tomake cheese curds, but maybe that'll happen in the more advanced class when I take that. I'll be sure to ask!

Annie

Looks very interesting and I'm sure it was fun too. I think if you had Carol along you would still all be in detention.

Detention? Nope, remember, the boss was along, she'd have posted bond. I think.

Annie

Ah how nice. I've been drooling over this website below, and I even tried looking around me for vegetable rennet, but couldn't find a local source. Maybe Surfas...I'm heading up there sometime in the future. Even so, I don't have the patience for making cheese...LOL I'd 'run to the phone' or computer. Funny, I can work with phyllo but give me a simple cheese recipe and my eyes glaze over.

Here is a link that might be useful: cheesemaking

Annie do what my friend does on his farmette. Get a cow and a calf, and let the calf do the milking. Sell the calf or eat it when it is weaned. Just milk when you want the milk. Of course that's not enough to run an "artisnal" dairy!

Jessica, Betsy referred us to a place called Siciliano's, it sells beer making supplies, wine making supplies, cheese making supplies. Would you like me to check and see if they have vegetable rennet when I go. I'm sure I will, in the next few months.

Mozzarella takes between half an hour and an hour, I was surprised it went so well. Trust me, you could do it.

L, you're still bucking for the commune here, aren't you? LOL. I can't sell a live animal, remember, I refuse to register under the "voluntary" National Animal Identification System so I am prohibited from selling at any commercial livestock sale.

I'm hoping when I move out to the farm I can talk one of the neighboring dairy farmers to just sell me as much milk as I want.

Annie

Then eat what's in between veal and steer.
This from the semi-vegetarian. I'd make the sacrafice for good dairy products!
A girl can dream can't she?

Looks like a lot of fun. I'd love to go to something like that.

Ann

Ann T, I could easily see you making mozzarella for your pizza while your dough is rising. This is something right up your alley and it only took 3 hours and $30! The boss went promptly to Barnes and Noble the next day and bought Ricki Carroll's book on cheesemaking, she's going to bring it in and lend it to me.

It was a lot easier than I expected and when Betsy melted the stuff, it strung (stringed?!) out about a foot. It was soft and good, not rubbery or hard. It would never have been grated, you'd have to cut it into chunks to put it on something.

I wonder how it would stand up to a little low temperature smoking......hmmmmm.....that could be much like smoked provolone, I think.

Annie

After reading "Animal, Vegitable, Miracle" I got a cheese making kit for Christmas. It is easy and fun to do, you don't need fresh milk in order to make the cheese, just straight from the store, as long as it's not ultra-pasterized, it will work. It only takes 30 minutes to make mozzarella.

Here's the paneer video -- it looks rudimentary - like just pressing the curds. I do love saag paneer (Indian spinach and cheese.)

Manjula making paneer

Love the pics! I've been experimenting with mozz and ricotta lately, and I recently made (goat) feta that turned out really well. I can give you details and pics of the process if you're interested.

I bought and would recommend the Ricki Carrol Cheesemaking cookbook. Her web site is also where I got my mozz and ricotta starter kit, and it's a great place to find the various off-the-beaten path ingredients you need for the process.

The hardest part of making feta is finding good quality non-ultra-pasteurized goat milk.

Living in Wisconsin, and having such easy access to high-quality cheeses, I don't think I'll branch out into hard cheeses, but the fresh ones are very fun to experiment with!

jazmynsmom, you've made feta, so the only difference is that it's goat's milk? Is it made much like mozzarella.

Oh yes, I'd love pictures and details on the feta, if you don't mind.

Annie

My photos are not as nice as yours, Annie. I can't recommend buying (or checking out from the library) the Ricki Carrol cheesemaking cookbook strongly enough, as it is very comprehensive and covers all the basics.

. That icon at top means you're supposed to hold the milk at heat in a hot water bath in the sink to regulate the temp. All the weird stuff (Mesophilic starter, real cheesecloth (which is different (tighter & doesn't unravel) from what you buy in the grocery store), lipase & calcium chloride) is available at www.cheesemaking.com. I don't mean to sound like an infomercial: I would have been lost without them.

First I got my stuff together.

I decided, instead of using the hot water bath the recipe called for, that I'd hold my milk steady by bringing it to heat in a stockpot, and then dumping the contents in my crockpot. My crockpot has a hole in the lid for a thermometer, so I could verify that I was keeping the temp steady without lifting the lid this way.

I was a little scared along the way that the curds weren't looking right.

But they got a little bigger.

You can't really see the firm curd in this photo because it's under the whey, but it's there... oh, and I don't have a cheese knife, but an offset spatula works fine:

After a while, the clumps looked better:

And then I dumped everything into a cheesecloth lined strainer, saving the whey in a pitcher for my dogs and cat (they LOVE it).

I hung the cheesecloth to drain on my combination cheese drainer/pasta drying rack (a tension rod) that I unscrew and store in my utensil drawer when not in use:

I ended up with something that looked about right:

Then I salted it and let it cure in my fridge for five days:

I've subsequently spoken to some goat cheese makers at Madison's farmer's market and have learned that I could have salted the whey and stored the cheese cubes in the whey with no ill effect.

Feta takes longer than mozzarella, but it's entirely do-able by an amateur. (Of that, I'm proof!) I was thoroughly pleased with the results both flavor-wise and process-wise. I learned a lot and had a good time doing it.

thank you, jazmynsmom, your pictures are perfect. The boss just bought that book, and I copied the recipes for ricotta, for feta, and just because I'm ambitious, for cheddar (mostly because it has to be aged at 55F but not at a particular humidity).

I'm definitely giving feta a try, now I have to track down a source for goat's milk. I don't normally like goat's milk cheeses but I will eat feta and Ashley just loves the stuff.

Annie

Annie that looks like an interesting class and jazmynsmom you seem to have the process very well in hand.

If we weren't living on an island where we have goats a-plenty and fresh goat cheese available daily, I would also be interested.

Looks like fun!

SharonCb

The "boss" strikes again...mmmmm...I see a trend going on here over the years....

Thanks for sharing Annie! What a cool place....learning to make cheese and all. You too Jaz, one of these days I'll have the time for this and more.

David

Wow! What an extraordinary day! I'd love to try that! looking forward to your future postings!

jazmynsmom...very cool, too. I'd like to try the feta. I saw a recipe in one of the cooking mags recently and wondered if I could do it. You and Annie make it seem entirely possible!

I haven't had time to read all the posts to this thread, but I just want to say, Annie, what fun that class looks like it was, and thank you for posting. One of these days I want to get into cheese making. Once again, you inspire.

Sally

I totally missed this the first time around! We were in OH at the time and not online. I'm so glad I found this thread! Now I really want to make some cheese.

Tracey

Tracey, mozzarella and ricotta are both so easy, I'm amazed.

Even with "store bought" milk, the mozzarella was pretty darned good!

Annie

I just ordered the book mentioned above. I really want to try pixie's recipe first. Stopped at Kroger trying to find rennet but no luck. I'm pretty sure they have it at the walmart and since school is cancelled tomorrow because of the snow I'm going to try tomorrow. Thanks again Annie for posting this.

Really interesting, I also missed this thread in october !!

I still can't figure out why my whey does nothing. Back to the drawing board.

gldno, I can tell you that if you scoop out the curds diligently, there is much less of the milk solid to turn into ricotta. I scooped mine carefully and got very little ricotta when I poured the whey through the cloth. Elery was not as careful and broke the curds a bit, and he had more of the milk solids when he strained the whey.

So, maybe you're just doing a very good job of removing the curd!

tracey, I'll be interested to see how your experiment goes, it's just so easy and infinitely do-able. That book also has directions for making ricotta from whole milk and skipping the mozzarella part entirely...

Annie