I tried making cheese once.
Here is the original article. I had a book.
This is not the most intuitive book. The author describes acid as the catalyst in curd formation, which is an understandable mistake.
I thought I would use organic milk, because my family has been trying to buy organic food in order to support a better food standard in the United States. Turns out they ultra-pasteurize organic milk making it unsuitable for cheese making. I was stubborn, and ended up with something that was cheese-like.
I used to regularly make sourdough bread and pizza. You can read about how this started
here. I used to obsess about trying to keep my starter from dying, and finding the perfect hydration for the ultimate pizza dough. Then one day, over a year ago, I let go. I put some of the starter in the back top shelf of my refrigerator and left it alone, unattended. Several times I have thought about throwing it out. Today I did throw it out.
My wife was cleaning out the fridge and found my old liquid rennet. She put it where I could see it and I threw it out, then went to work. At work I kept thinking about cheese making. I came home and went over some Youtube videos. I remembered there was a pretty simple cheese using just acid and heat to create the curds. I found some videos demonstrating how easy that process was. I looked at my lemon tree outside.
So I went to the grocery store and bought two gallons of milk, not organic, not ultra-pasteurized. I went home, started heating a gallon of milk, and collected some lemons from the tree. I found my butter muslin from the previous effort and set it up in a colander. I pulled out my tomme and follower (cheese mold). The process went pretty smoothly. I got curds, put them in the colander to drain, transferred to the press, and...
Queso fresco con Limon. This type of cheese is very crumbly and doesn't melt. I believe the heat may drive off all of the meltable components of cheese (fats, heat sensitive proteins). It was great with a couple of fried eggs and Tabasco sauce.
So Milk (not ultra-pasteurized), plus acid (lemon), plus catalyst (heat). For the second attempt: Milk, plus acid (produced by bacterial culture), plus catalyst (RENNET).
So my simple schema, what I believe, and have evidence for, is the foundation of all cheese:
1. Milk
2. Acid - either as a chemical (think vinegar or citric acid), or bacterial fermentation (my preference).
3. Catalyst - heat, and/or Rennet
The original Rennet comes from a cow's stomach and therefore likes an acidic environment. Raw milk has bacteria that given the time will turn the milk sour with acid. One of the videos on Youtube stressed the importance of this in their cheese making. The first cheese was probably just some milk being stored in a calf stomach container.
I started thinking about how to optimize the cheese making conditions. My semester in Biochemistry Lab, and the lab on enzyme optimization was put to use. It turns out pH is also critical in other aspects of cheese making - like mozzarella, where the curds need to be stretchable.
I had bought some vegetarian Rennet tablets. My daughter is vegetarian, and I want her to be able to try my cheese. I still had some of the thermophilic culture in the freezer. My microbiological background told me that a frozen, lyophilized bacterial culture was still going to be useful, even if a year old.
Batch number 2 with thermophilic culture (still working great btw) and Vegetarian Rennet came out well. Enzymatics and fermentation coming together to make wonder food. I still don't have a cheese press with precise pounds of pressure, but hey, neither did the earliest cheese makers. I'm thinking about cave man cheese now. Here are some photos of process to aging:
In the brine
The one on the right is the thermophilic culture. The one on the left was done using a mesophilic culture in an effort to make Mozzarella. Mozzarella taught me humility, and the importance of pH in stretching curds.
So what about that sourdough? I took a spoonful of the old culture and mixed it with 100 grams of organic flour and dechlorinated water. It started right up. So I threw the rest of the "old" culture out.
I tried making mozzarella (see above), but the curds didn't stretch. Still I pressed the curds into a shape and then made pizza dough. I'm out of practice. I shouldn't have tried the 70% hydration, or put whey in the mix. But I have a lot of whey from the flurry of cheese making, and it is really good for you in terms of protein. It is great as an additive for all types of cooking. I've used it in Ramen, Risotto, and gravies. Still, I wasn't used to it in the pizza dough, and it goofed up the processing. I pressed on. Pizza Neapolitan:
You can see how my pseudo-mozzarella didn't melt all that great, and it wasn't stretchy at all.
I had a lot of sourdough starter, so I made pancakes:
Those bubbles are completely from wild yeast action, no baking soda or powders.
I put the rest of the starter into the fridge, top shelf.
