My first homemade cheese is now on the table. It's not my first homemade cheese, it's the first one to ripen. The Wensleydales and Cheddars are still in the wine fridge, doing their fermentation thing.
I used this recipe, more or less. It includes pictures and tips at every step.
I started on 06/07/18. I did not follow the recipe exactly. I used half cup of yogurt instead of yogurt
starter. I tried to follow the method exactly but being new at cheese, I made a few elementary errors.
After draining curds insufficiently, tried to pack them in metal mold.
Tipping them from one end to the other of this mold didn’t work – they were too
sloppy and fell apart. As an emergency, I quickly boiled some muslin and rehung
the curds.When they stopped dripping I put them in a probably insufficiently
sterilized too-small smaller mold on not very sterilized mats. From
there tipped every 15 minutes for an hour, every hour for three hours and then
overnight at RT. I smoothed it off 06/11/18, poked holes in it, and put into cheese fridge in a closed box for humidity. I calculated it would take 2.5 months to ripen, which would make it September first, and from then it could be refrigerated for up to 2 months. It was
fully ripened by 7/20 – I could tell because a litttle tongue of soft cheese leaked out of the blue rind.
It is extraordinarily good. Mild and soft.
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