Milk (52 page)

You are now primed to understand the main factors that make any fresh cheese tick. A little practice with this version will equip you to go on to another “cottage cheese” made with just two added factors: rennet and a little more heat.

F
or makers of aged cheeses, renneting is a complex business involving many factors. Those of us interested only in making small batches of fresh cheese have only a few things to keep in mind. First of all, rennet and
lactic-acid fermentation reinforce each other’s action; second, renneted curd is profoundly affected by temperature. Curd produced by culturing alone is more forgiving of heat. But if you slap a pot of renneted milk on the stove and rapidly heat it above 120°F, the result will be as fresh and tender as boiled rubber. Thus you need to do more advance thinking than for other kinds of fresh cheese, and plan on spending an hour or more at the stove during the heating stage. The advantage is that with a little practice you will be able to better manipulate such factors as degree of firmness or softness, sourness or blandness, than with culturing alone.

Before you begin, read through the directions on
this page
for preparing a cloth-lined colander set over a saucepan or other vessel, tying the cloth into a bag, and hanging it up to drain. But this time you will also have to get together some extra equipment: a pot large enough to hold the one containing the milk, a sturdy rack to set the (heavy) milk pot on inside the larger one, a long thin-bladed knife or metal spatula, a heat deflector such as a Flame Tamer, a stirring implement (wooden spoon or rubber spatula) long enough
to reach the bottom of the milk pot, and an instant-reading thermometer, preferably one with a long probe.

You had better try out the rack arrangement beforehand. The top rims of the smaller and larger pots should be at least roughly level. If you don’t have a rack high and strong enough for the purpose, use a few empty cans with tops and bottoms removed. Or try my improvised “rack” for setting a 6-quart Dutch oven inside a 12-quart one: two 5-pan sets of 3-x-5-inch disposable aluminum loaf pans from the supermarket, left stacked for extra strength. Use a screwdriver to punch about a dozen holes through the bottoms of each set, and put them in the larger pot, upside down. Luckily they can be endlessly reused for this purpose.

Look when possible for fresh skim milk made without added milk solids, as well as very fresh buttermilk with live cultures. As with the preceding fresh cheese version (
this page
), the recipe can be halved.

YIELD:
About 4 cups cheese, 12 cups faintly soured whey. (See
Uses of Whey
.)

Get together all the equipment listed above. Have the kitchen sink clear for use as a water bath.

Pour the milk into a 6-quart pot, run hot water into the sink to a depth of several inches, and set the pot in it. Stir the milk gently, occasionally rechecking the temperature and carefully adding hot water if necessary, until it reaches about 85° to 90°F. Carefully remove the pot. Shake up the buttermilk before measuring. Crush the piece of rennet tablet in a few spoonfuls of water in a cup, making sure it dissolves thoroughly. Stir the buttermilk and rennet into the milk, then go away and leave the lightly covered pot
completely undisturbed
in a warm spot (preferably at a temperature of 75° to 80°F).

In about 10 to 12 hours the milk will show the first sign of the difference between fresh cheese curdled by lactic fermentation alone and that with a combination of culture and rennet: more rapid curd formation, with clearer separation of whey. This may be hard to judge without jostling the milk. As gently as possible, test it by slipping a thin knife blade just under the surface.
When the curd seems almost to “unzip” in a clean cut revealing fairly clear-looking whey, it’s ready. The texture will be slightly firmer than that of simply cultured curd.

Now for the most delicate part of the operation, which will take at least an hour: First, set the larger pot on a Flame Tamer or other heat deflector over a stove burner and put your rack arrangement in it.

Next, use your knife or spatula to very carefully cut straight down through the curd at roughly ⅓- to ½-inch intervals. (Don’t worry about mathematical precision.) Make a second set of cuts at right angles to the first. Holding the blade at a forty-five-degree angle to the vertical cuts, make a third set of cuts, this time oblique—an inexact but good enough home equivalent of professional curd-cutting with wire “cheese harps” that do both vertical and horizontal cutting. The aim is to encourage still more curd-whey separation.

Now carefully set the pot of curd on the rack and even more carefully pour enough lukewarm water into the larger pot to come most of the way up the sides of the smaller one (leave a few inches of leeway). This is your equivalent of an industrial-scale water jacket. Turn on the heat, keeping it fairly low, and begin checking the water temperature, which has to rise slowly rather than rapidly. Be aware that once it starts heating you may have trouble slowing it down. When it gets above about 100°F, turn your attention to the milk pot.

You must now bring the curd from about room temperature (say, 75°F) to roughly 108°F at the rate of only two or three degrees every five minutes—thirty-some degrees in about an hour. Begin testing the temperature in different parts of the pot. Every few minutes, carefully stir the curd with a long spoon or spatula. The object is not to agitate or mix the contents of the pot but to let the whey circulate as freely as possible around the pieces of cut curd, evening out their temperature and making the curd firmer by promoting more whey loss. As the casein matrix knits together more firmly, it will literally squeeze out more and more moisture. The longer you continue, the more whey in proportion to curd you will see in the kettle.

It doesn’t matter if bits of curd break off in stirring; they will be retrieved in the final straining. Keep checking the temperature and as it reaches about 100°F, turn the heat as low as possible. If the curd seems to be warming up too fast, lift the pot from the larger vessel, turn off the heat, and add some cold water or ice cubes to the warm water before cautiously resuming operations. When the temperature of the curd reaches 108°F (or something between 105° and 110°F—on the whole, better a bit too cool than too warm), try to hold it at that level without further warming for about 15 minutes. (If necessary, add ice to the water bath or briefly lift the milk pot out of it.)

Now set up your cloth-lined-colander arrangement. Carefully ladle in the curd and some of the whey; pour in the remaining whey as gently as possible.
Tie the cloth into a bag for draining as before. It will drain more promptly and completely than the rennetless version, yielding anything from an ounce to a few ounces less cheese and more whey.

When the whey has stopped dripping, decide whether to take or omit a step that I never bother with myself: Fill the sink with ice water and slosh the bag around while kneading the cheese with your hands to rinse out the last remnants of partly sour whey. Many people regard this as standard practice; I can only suppose that they want something as “sweet” and innocuous as supermarket cottage cheese. Personally, I think the small amount of residual whey gives the cheese character.

If you have rinsed the curd, hang it up to drain again (this time it will go faster) before proceeding to the end stage: Turn out the cheese into a mixing bowl, and work it as smooth as possible with a wooden spoon. Work in salt to taste. Some people like to add a little fresh cream at the same time; I usually prefer the cheese without. Store and use as for the rennetless version.

VARIATIONS:
I think there is nothing better than either rennetless or renneted fresh cheese made with skim milk. But excellent ones can also be made with whole milk, either homogenized or (as I prefer) unhomogenized. They are nearly creamy enough to pass for cream cheese. If you use unhomogenized milk you will see some melted butterfat appearing on the surface as you heat it. But most of the butterfat will remain with the curd when you drain it in cheesecloth, and any that goes off in the whey can easily be salvaged by chilling the whey and lifting the fat from the surface, to be worked back into the cheese.

The same technique can be used to make a simple culture-and-rennet fresh
goats’-milk cheese. But trial and error are even more the rule here than in most home dairying experiments. The huge variations in the chemical makeup of any species’s milk that have been partly erased from the modern commercial cows’-milk supply remain glaringly obvious in goats’ milk from different herds and dairies. All goats’ milk differs from cows’ milk in casein structure, the factor that most directly affects curdling behavior. But there is also a range of differences in goats’-milk casein not only among particular breeds but—because of the strongly seasonal tendency of goats’ mating patterns—among samples taken at different times of the year. Also, not all processors will label the milk to tell you if it’s been frozen. The practical result for a home cheesemaker is that no recipe can reliably tell you the correct amount of rennet for a gallon of goats’ milk or the time the milk should be left to curdle after renneting and inoculation. With identical amounts and timings I have ended up with a curd that refused to become curd at all (it tasted great, though, and I successfully presented it to friends as “goat buttermilk”), a curd too unpleasantly tough for anything but throwing out, and a nice soft cheese.

A fresh white goats’-milk cheese is good enough to risk a few failures. I suggest starting to check the degree of curdling after eight hours; do not let the curd become as stubbornly firm as a wrong opinion. Omit the steps of cutting and heating the curd. The cheese will be ready to drain once you have a somewhat (not decidedly) firm curd. When finished it will be very mild, with scarcely a hint of goatiness. (That characteristic emerges only after brief aging.) The main clue that it comes from goats’ rather than cows’ milk will be the more smoothly, finely knit texture of the curd.

C
ream cheese is a great confidence builder for neophyte cheesemakers. Cream is really far easier to work with than milk. Its comparatively small
casein content means that even after renneting it never forms a curd requiring to be cut and laboriously brought to a crucial temperature; there’s scarcely anything you need to do to the cream once it’s set except drain it.

If you have never eaten any kind of cream cheese except Kraft’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese and other commercial knockoffs, the homemade version free of gums and stabilizers will require some mental readjustment. Like most other kinds of fresh cheese, cream cheese has meant many things to many people in the last few centuries. We can only guess at what the term referred to before the global triumph of the foil-wrapped product baptized with the name “Philadelphia.”

The only wisp of certainty in a vacuum of information is that cream cheese from perhaps the eighteenth century on usually involved cream curdled and drained to a cheesy consistency. As mentioned earlier, something called “cream cheese” had been considered a Philadelphia delicacy for more than a generation before the Empire Cheese Company began selling “Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese” from a plant in Otsego County, New York, in the early 1880s. (“Dear Longo,” the New York bon vivant
Sam Ward wrote to his friend
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1841, “Just returned from Philadelphia.… What took me there?…Not creamcheese, nor melons, nor Preciosa [the ballerina Fanny Elssler], but the Chinese Museum, which closes tonight.”) One can only guess
how much it resembled today’s commercial cream cheese. In 1867 the New York market chronicler
Thomas F. De Voe described as a Philadelphia specialty one kind of cream cheese “made from rich sour cream tied up in linen cloth to drain, then laid on a deep dish, still covered around, and turned every day, and sprinkled with salt for ten days or a fortnight, until it is ripe. If wanted to ripen quick, cover it with mint or nettle leaves.”

De Voe’s Philadelphia cream cheese sounds much more interesting (and creamier) than the kind now known from Rome to Rio, which undoubtedly didn’t reach anything like its present form until the late 1920s. That was when a series of technological innovations began paving the way for cream cheese made by liquefying a not particularly creamy curd at a temperature well above the boiling point of water, concentrating it in a mechanical separator, standardizing it to a desired fat percentage, and pumping the hot fluid mixture directly into small rectangular foil packages for retail sale. Because the heat-treated cheese tends to leak water, gums such as guar and locust bean are routinely added at the standardizing stage. The end product, “hot pack cream cheese,” has a distinctly cooked flavor and gummy consistency that cannot have belonged to cream cheese before the hot-pack revolution. Today even gourmet and health-food shops and some cheese stores are unlikely to carry anything but hot-pack cream cheese, under whatever label.

Given the popularity of cream cheese made by this technique, talk of fresher-tasting alternatives may sound like an affectation. But I honestly recommend looking for gum-free brands, if only to be able to make the comparison. Or for an idea of what really fresh cream cheese can be, try one of the following two recipes.