[Sca-cooks] Cheese Making

[C M Bucheger]

Recently there was some discussion about cheese making and some of the additives that are required, specifically the calcium- something or another that someone asserted that without, the curds would not come if using homogenized milk.  I was a little puzzled by this as I've made a couple of batches of cheese using unhomogenized and homogenized milk from a local nonhormones-and-other-additives dairy and also a regular gallon of milk from the local HEB, using yorgurt and/or lemon juice as a curdling agent and got about the same results.  Curds were not especially big, but they were there and I had cheese.
Still I was ready to try cheese using "real" rennet, so I ordered a kit from cheesemaking.com and made a batch following Markham's receipt with a gallon of milk from HEB.  It was not good.  After waiting an hour for curds and not getting any I added some more of the rennet.  I think I almost had curds at this point.  I drained the curds and got a ball of soft cheese that was half the size I had gotten from a half gallon of milk.

So it seems to me, using the vegtable rennet does require this additional additive to make cheese using homogenized milk, while other curdling agents may not.

Alexandria