Making Basic Cheese (Part 2 Pressing)

Little Miss Muffett sat on a tuffet, eating her curds & whey...

Hey!  Welcome back.  You decided to join us on the continuation of our journey in making basic cheese. Anyone can do this. Believe me, we're nothing special and, you're about to see, we use the simplest of means to get the job done. Okay, cheese heads, let's do this thing:

Yesterday, we left off where we had poured most of the whey off of the curds.  In the photo below, we're adding a Tablespoon of kosher salt to the curds and we stir that up nicely to evenly distribute the salt.

Adding the NaCl

We have a special basket that you'll see further down that has holes in it like a colander.  What we're going to do now is further press more whey out of the curds in our crude, homemade press.  We line the basket with muslin cloth and scoop handfuls of the curds into the cloth lined basket.

Scooping out curds and putting them in the basket...

Okay, with a little Cajun ingenuity or redneck engineering, I made a cheese press with a Gumbo pot and a bungee strap.  Let me explain a little more.  In the bottom of the pot, I've turned a plate upside down.  I then sit the cloth-lined basket of curds on top of the plate and neatly fold the excess cloth on top of the basket to completely cover.

I measured the inside diameter of the basket, allowing for 3/4 inches of 'play' between the disk and the basket and cut out the disk of plywood.  I put it in a Ziploc bag (for food safety) and placed it on top of the basket of curds.  The disk is what's known as my 'pusher.'    

A Redneck Cheese press made from a Gumbo pot

When I say pusher, that's exactly what it will do.  The disk, with pressure added, will push down on the curds and will make the remaining whey exit the basket.  The Gumbo pot will catch that additional whey and we'll give it to our hens.  They love it! Note that in order to get some pressure, I've placed two cans on top of the pusher. These cans are cans of Ripe (Black) Olives.  I love these bad boys and can eat a can or more at a single sitting.  As kids we used to put one on the end of each of our fingers and snack on them - but I digress.  You can use any can or block or any other object for this task.

Redneckedness on display

And here we go.  Now you can see how it works.  The bungee strap pulls down on the cans and the pusher evacuates excess whey from the curds.  This is not an exact, scientific, but we're making Basic Cheese. Different types of cheeses require different pounds of pressure for specific times.  We'll show you that process a little later. We set our Gumbo Pot cheese press out of the way and will let it press overnight.  If you could peer down in the pot, you would already see whey starting to collect in the bottom of the pot.

I envision Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation using something like this to make cheese.

The next day we loosen the bungee straps and unwrap the raw cheese.  What have we here?  Some fresh, raw, uncured cheese!  It's fine to snack on now, if you'd like.

It's not easy being cheesy

You can see the cheese by the basket.  Now you can get an idea of how the whey is pushed out through the slots in the basket.  There is another cheese mold that we use and we will show you that later.

Cheese with basket

Just for grins, I put the cheese on our kitchen scale to see how much we made.  Two pounds of cheese!  So, 2 gallons of milk makes 2 pounds of cheese.  You can see where the pusher pushed down, it made a 'lip' on the top.  I don't know if you're like this, but I am: We slice off the lip to make the cheese uniform.  I don't like non-uniform edges.  I'm especially OCD on that with a pan of brownies.  I like the pan to be even and it bugs me when it's not, so I eat a few slices until the pan of brownies is geometrically complete in a square or rectangle again.  Weird, yes, so I've been told (delicately) by my loving wife.

2 Pounds of Basis Cheese

Okay, we've separated the curds and whey, We've pressed it.  Tune in tomorrow to see the next step in cheese making.  I think you'll find the next step interesting.