Making Basic Cheese (Part 4 Tasting the Cheese & A New Fancy Cheese Press!)

Congratulations.  You have proved your stamina and endurance and have made it to the last Our Maker's Acres How to Make Cheese blog post.  Thanks for joining us in our four part cheese making extravaganza.  Today is the final day.  The cheese has been made and sealed.  It has aged for a few days.  Normally you'd want to age it for a couple of months, but we wanted to make sure it was good, so we impatiently cut it open.  Besides, I read on the Internet that the average American eats 32 pounds of cheese each year.  Since the year is running out, we have to ensure we eat our allotted amount.

Who cut the cheese?  Not me! It was Tricia!

Okay, I'd like to tell you that it was the best cheese we've ever tasted, but that would be a gross exaggeration at best.  But it wasn't bad.  It wasn't bad at all.  In fact, it was quite good!  We snacked on it and then used a bunch of it in making casseroles for our Thanksgiving Day Feast and for grating on top of chili.  It was delicious cheese, which is impressive due to the fact that it hasn't aged and that it wasn't properly pressed. Using a proper cheese press allows you to exert certain pounds of pressure on the curds so that you make different types of hard cheeses.

This proves that Tricia is a Cheese Whiz!

Once we proved to ourselves that we could do this, we decided to get serious about it and ordered a set of plans for $5 to build a Dutch Press.  When the plans arrived and we looked them over closely, I saw that it required one end to be anchored into the wall.  We didn't like that idea and I began thinking about how to convert the plans into a stand-alone unit that can be stored out of the way when not in use.

The problem with that is that I'm not a carpenter or craftsman.  Fortunately, we have a good friend who is. I showed him the plans and he quickly determined that he could build it according to our two requirements:

• It couldn't contain treated wood since this is for food purposes, and
• It had to be built using scrap lumber (nothing purchased)

In three shakes of a billy goat's tail, he brought over this beautiful "Old World Quality" Homemade, Super Dooper Cheese Press:

C'est Magnifique!

Note that we're still using the gumbo pot!  Here's how the Dutch Press works:

• The curds are placed in the cheese mold,
• The cheese mold is placed in the gumbo pot on top of a steaming plate with holes in it.  This keeps the mold out of the whey that is pressed out.
• The pusher is placed into the cheese mold and a wooden shaft is placed into the pusher,
• The shaft's pointed end is placed into carved notches, depending on which type of cheese you are making. 

There is a table that identifies which notch, coupled with which weights, applies certain pounds of pressure to the curds in the cheese mold. It is pretty scientific (for me, at least) based on principles of physics regarding levers.

Lever action

This photo shows the opposite side of the cheese press lever.  There is a cradle to hold various weights.  The cradle alone weighs exactly 2 pounds.  The 2 x 6 block sitting on the counter weighs 2 pounds as it has steel rods inserted in it.  Finally the wooden box in the cradle is a sealed box of rocks that weight 6 pounds. That combination of weights allows you to apply weights anywhere from 2 to 10 pounds to the press. Currently 8 pounds of weight is pressing the cheese.

Pressing Issues to attend to

Once that weight is applied, you can see that the cheese mold, which has holes all over its sides, begins to seep whey through the holes due to the pressure being applied. Notice the whey dripping out of the mold and falling onto the steaming plate below. The steaming plate has holes in it so that the whey further falls into the bottom of the gumbo pot.

That is WHEY cool!

Here is a look at it after we cured it for a couple of days and sealed it in beeswax and labelled it.

Nice cheese wheel

I learned on the Internet that the terms "big wheel" and "big cheese" to refer to important, wealthy people was because of cheese, because in the old days, only the important people could afford to purchase big wheels of cheese.  We aren't what I'd consider wealthy in terms of assets or money, but we do feel blessed by God.

Benjamin's LEGO character stands atop the cheese wheel with a sword and an axe and he's visibly upset. He just learned that we're not going to cut this cheese for 6 months.  Cheese gets better with age and we're going to be patient with this one. We'll let you know how it tastes during the Summer of 2014.  Thanks for coming along on our Fromage Festival.