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.

Making Basic Cheese (Part 1 Culturing & Separating Curds from Whey)

Three cows in milk will give you a LOT of dairy products.  Besides milk there are other value added products like, butter, creme fraiche, whipped cream, kefir, buttermilk, and various types of cheeses.  Let's make some basic cheese!

The first thing we do when making basic cheese is adding a culture to the milk.  The culture we are adding is buttermilk that we've frozen in ice cube trays.  You use 1 1/2 to 2 Tablespoons of buttermilk to 2 gallons of raw milk.  We thaw out the buttermilk.

Thawing out a couple cubes of frozen buttermilk

We sterilize the pot we will be making the cultured milk in by boiling about a half inch of water for 5 minutes and allowing it to steam.

A squeaky clean pot

Here are two gallons of fresh raw milk that we got from milking Daisy and Rosie. We've just gotten it out of the refrigerator.

Fresh, rich milk

Once the pot has been sterilized, we pour the milk in the pot and warm it until it reaches 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bringing the milk up to 68 degrees

Then we add 1 1/2 to 2 Tablespoons of buttermilk to the warm milk.  We allow the milk to culture by letting it sit for 8 hours at room temperature.  After 8 hours warm the milk up to 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

Adding buttermilk, allowing it to sit for 8 hours and then warming it up

Now we add 8 drops of animal rennet to half a cup of water.  Animal rennet comes from the stomach lining of young calves and will cause the milk to separate into curds and whey.

Adding 8 drops of animal rennet to water

Once the milk is warmed to 86 degrees, pour the rennet water mixture into the warm cultured milk.  Stir and allow to sit for an hour.

Adding rennet to the cultured milk

In an hour, you want to test for a "clean break" by inserting your finger at the edge of the pot.  It should be firm and not leave gooey stuff on your finger.  If it does allow it to sit a little longer.

Checking for a clean break

Once you have a clean break, you want to cut the curds with a knife into half inch cubes by cutting in one direction and then spinning the pot and cutting in the other.

Cutting the curds

Then stir the curds with your hands and start slowly heating it to 102 degrees while stirring.   

Look at those nice curds!

Now cut the larger cubes into smaller ones while continuing to stir.          

Cutting them into smaller pieces

Stir for about 15 minutes after you heat it to the desired temperature.  You'll notice the curds start to shrink so that they look like scrambled eggs.

The 'scrambled eggs' look

Now turn off the heat and let the curds sink to the bottom for a few minutes and then pour off the whey into another container.

Pouring off the whey

Once you get toward the end, you might want to use a colander to keep your curds from pouring into the whey.  What to do with all this whey?  Well, you could make ricotta cheese with it.  Perhaps we'll show that later.  Another thing we do is feed it to our hens.  They love it and it is full of protein and probiotics (beneficial bacteria).  You can also use whey as a preservative when lacto-fermenting vegetables.  We do this when we make our sauerkraut and gingered carrots.

Where there's a will, there's a WHEY!

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of making basic cheese as we illustrate how a bunch of gooey curds transform into cheese.