[Sca-cooks] Cheese making
Rikke D. Giles
rgiles at centurytel.net
Sun Mar 24 20:23:13 PDT 2013
Greetings,
I was slated to teach a cheese class at West Coast Culinary Symposium
next week. Unfortunately, my milking goats thought different and have
the temerity to be scheduled to give birth around then. So I'll be
staying home doing farm stuff.
Anyway, tips I would give to a beginner:
Keep it clean: clean milk, extra clean equipment, extra clean kitchen,
clean water, clean clothing, clean dairy maid. They knew this in
period too, Markham says the dairy should be as 'clean as a Prince's
bedroom'. Heh. Others advise similarly.
Use the very best milk you can get. If you can get it raw and fresh
from the animal, that's the best (assuming it's milked cleanly).
Having said that, I've used every type of 'freshness' from still warm
from the animal to a week or 10 days old and raw, to ultra-pasteurized
and homogenized. The only failures to 'make' were with the ultra-
pasteurized milk.
You'll fail from time to time. Failures can be good. They teach.
Most of mine I've eaten a bit, just to see. Never gotten food
poisoning. Have had an immediate vomit reaction from the flavor. The
typical failure (for me) is when the cheese 'blows' (expands in size).
It can blow quite quickly while draining or under pressure from stray
yeasts. It can blow after pressing from e. coli (usually NOT the
poisonous kind). Both will make the cheese smell mighty fine, and
taste horrendous. Swiss cheese is a cheese with desired 'blowing' in
which the propionic bacteria create gas which makes the holes in the
cheese.
You can make simple molded cheeses using clean styrofoam cups in which
you've punched holes with a super clean nail. It's not hard to move up
to pressed cheeses, but... the learning curve to make a really good
pressed cheese with a natural rind is pretty high. Not because it's
complicated, but because it takes a long time to get familiar with the
milk, the seasons, what your husband's instance on baking fresh bread,
your water source, your bacteria, etc, do to the rind and the aging.
I've been doing this 8 or 9 years now, and I'm finally making really
really good natural rinded long aged cheeses.
Good luck and have fun!
Aelianora de Wyntringham
Barony of Dragon's Laire, An Tir
PS If anyone wants a personal version of the class I was going to teach
at Culinary Symposium, let me know. I also run a fairly popular cheese
making demo at June Faire in Kitsap County, WA (first weekend in June)
and will be teaching cheese at another event in August if anyone is
interested.
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