Cheese Making

Overview


A quick guide to making Cheese from Cows Milk.

Cheese-making
Cheese is fermented milk. You can start the fermentation process with lab-ferment or with a kind of acid like citric acid. The taste of the resulting cheese will differ depending upon the ingredient which started the fermentation process. Cheese from lab-ferment has the typical cheese taste, cheese from citric acid is much sweeter and you would use it for cream cheese.

Taste
 * The taste also depends on other ingredients you can add to the milk, like salt, pepper, pieces of chilies, peppercorns, garlic, herbs and so on. The taste also depends on the kinds of milk you will use (unskimmed milk, skimmed milk, clabber, buttermilk, whey, mix of some of them). The taste also depends on the temperature you are "burning" the cheese. The higher the temperature is, the more "poignant" the taste will be. The taste also depends on the size of the pieces you will cut the fermented milk. The more whey which stays in the cheese, the more the cheese will taste "sour". The taste also depends on the time it will takes until you will eat him. The longer this time will be, the harder and dryer the cheese will be and the more you will recognize his natural flavor. The taste also depends on the kind of care you will use. You can storage cheese in brine or dry in salt, or without salt. You can use some kinds of mold fungus to increase his resilience, e.g. many kinds of soft cheese like Camembert or Gorgonzola. And the taste and also the resilience and the work you will have to do depends on the moon, if you don't use much chemistry for making cheese. (I would like to explain it better because this is the most important thing to make good and resilience cheese whithout chemistry but I don't know the English words for that explanation.)

Setup
 * To start making cheese you should have enough milk. What is enough? That depends upon how much cheese you want to produce and which kind of milk you will use and which kind of cheese you are making and, and, and ... but you can say that you will need about 12 to 20 liters of milk to earn about 1 kilogramm of hard cheese. (For soft cheese even less milk)

Skim
 * We used our evening milk as unskimmed milk and our morning milk as skimmed milk, like our forefathers did during the last century. There are some reasons for that decision. First, you don't have so much work in the evening after milking, only to look for cooling the milk. In the morning the milk is warm after milking and this is best for skimming it with mechanical support. And you have to clean that machine which is used for skimming. That is not nice in the evening when you first have to prepare hot water. And, of course the taste of the cheese is best if you use skimmed and unskimmed milk nearly with the same amount.

Fermentation
 * Now put the whole milk in a big pot and put it on the stove. Heat the milk up to 32 - 45 ° Celsius (depending on the receipt you are using) while you are stirring the milk. Put the fermentation ingredient and some salt (depending on the receipt you are using) into the milk and stir the milk to make sure that salt and fermentation ingredient will interfuse the whole milk. Then stop stirring and stop the movement of the milk in the pot. Now you have to wait (depending on the receipt you are using) some time. When the milk becomes a white mass like pudding or mozzarella you should cut this mass into small cubes (size is depending on the receipt you are using, some kinds of cheese wouldn't be cut, some kinds would be cut and stirred with an egg whisk until the pieces have the size of only some millimeters during you will heat the pot up to 45 ° Celsius).

Straining
 * After cutting and stirring you will strain the cheese mass in a cheese cloth and put the mass with the cloth into a cheese form like a colander. This cheese form will affect the form of the ready cheese. Now you put the top cover on the cheese form and a weight on the top cover. After some time you have to turn around the cheese in the cheese form and pin down the top cover agian. After one day you will take the cheese out of the cheese form.

'''Finishing
 * Now you have to take care of the cheese depending on the receipt you are using.