On Making Cheese

What's this?  A blog about beer and the first post is about making cheese?  Well... yes, yes it is.  And why not?  Beer and cheese share many things in common.  First, they are both delicious.  Both beer and cheese can be creamy or dry, dense or light, clean or funky, simple or complex.  Both have traditions stretching back thousands of years.  Egyptians used beer to preserve the nutritious value of their grain crops.  They used cheese to preserve the nutritious value of their milk.  The array of flavors created by subtle differences in procedure are incredible.  With beer, for example, changing the temperature at which you mash grains by a mere 4 degrees makes a completely different beer.  Cheese is the same.  Small differences in time, pressure, or temperature cause dramatic changes in the character of the final cheese.  Lastly, both are creations of microorganisms that humans have reined in to do our bidding.  The basic outline of the two processes are very similar.

Step	Beer	Cheese
Plants	Barley	Grass or grains
Processing of plants	Malting of barley	Processed through cows/sheep/goats
Microorganisms	Yeast	Bacteria
Fermentation	Wort is fermented at temperature with yeast to create beer.	Milk is held at temperature to ripen (ferment) it with lactic acid bacteria.
Ageing	Beer is aged for various times and in various containers to achieve final product	Cheese is aged for several weeks to several years to develop it's character.

These processes can even use much of the same equipment! Several breweries use discarded dairy tanks as fermenters. Open-top cheese vats have also been used for open fermentation of farmhouse or sour styles of beer.

Anyway, now that I have explained myself, on to the cheese making!

Taking a cue from cheap pro brewers, I used much of my homebrewing equipment for my cheese. I did need several pieces of dedicated equipment like a cheese mold and cheesecloth, but those were easy enough to get at my homebrew shop in a hard cheese making kit.

I made an Italian hard cheese called Bra. I wanted to make cheddar, but my homebrew shop was out of the right kind of culture to make it. I've never had - or even heard of - Bra before, but it is a cheese made in a very specific province (Cuneo) in northwest Italy and protected by European law under its PDO status.  It can be either hard or soft and is usually, but not always, made from cow's milk.

Ingredients -

• 1 gallon of unhomogenized whole milk - I don't really get into the whole organic thing but it seems that to get unhomogenized milk, it has to be organic... so $11 for a gallon of milk it is.
• 1 packet of thermophilic cheese culture - There are two kinds of cheese culture - mesophilic and thermophilic.  Mesophilic cultures like moderate temperatures, whereas thermophilic cultures like warm temperatures.  Thermophilic means heat (thermotita) love (philia).  This came with my cheese kit.
• 1.5ml of Rennet - Rennet is what makes the cheese coagulate.  This also came with my cheese kit, but can be found easily online.
• 300g of cheese salt.  Cheese salt is a fine grain salt without iodine added to it.  My kit came with cheese salt specifically, but any salt that doesn't have iodine in it will do.  Kosher salt could work if you blend it in a spice grinder.  Pickling salt works too.
• 1tsp white vinegar.  

Equipment -

• 1 gallon jug
• 1 large pot big enough to hold the jug and some water
• 1 spoon
• 1 chopstick
• cheese cloth
• 1 strainer
• 1 5 gallon cooler
• 1 can for a weight
• 1 cheese mold

Step 1: Sanitize.

The first step in cheese making is sanitation.  I created a bath of sanitizer solution in my sink.  I like StarSan, but any no-rinse sanitizer will do.  All items that will touch the milk at any time must touch the sanitizer first.

Step 2: Heat the milk.

Heating the milk

I cut the top of the milk jug off so that I could easily access the curds later on.  Then I poured the milk into the jug.  There was about 1/4 cup of cream and milk left because I cut off some of the volume of the container (See my note below about using this at the bottom of the post).  I set the jug into my large pot filled with warm water.  I put in the jug when the bath was around 130°F.  As the milk absorbed some of the heat the water bath cooled down.  Adding hot water occasionally kept the temp around 120°F.  My target temperature for the milk was  95°F.  When warming the milk this way it is important to stir the milk every once and a while to distribute the heat evenly.  You could also use the microwave but I didn't for a couple of reasons.  First, my jug didn't fit into my microwave.  Second, I felt that it would be too easy to overshoot my target temp with the microwave.  By using a hot water bath I was easily able to control the exact temperature of the milk.  Once the milk reached 95°F I added my thermophilic cheese culture and stirred to mix it in.

Incubating the milk

Step 3: Ripening.

After adding the culture I transferred my jug to what normally serves as my hot liquor tank.  It is important to maintain temperature throughout the process, so the cooler is a perfect incubator.  The inoculated milk sat in the incubation cooler for 40 minutes.  The culture lowers the pH of the milk and starts to grow.  After 40 minutes it's time for the rennet.  I used a liquid rennet that came with my kit, but powdered versions are also available.  The instructions that came with the kit told me to dilute 1.5ml of rennet into 5ml of water.  It is probably best to use a water dropper for this, but since I didn't have one I used my gram scale I use for my water treatment in homebrewing.  It has a 0.1g accuracy so it was perfect for this application.  After adding the rennet to the acidulated milk I noticed the temp had dropped to about 93°F so I put it back in my water bath to bring it back to 95°F.  Then it was back into the water cooler for another 40 minute rest.  

This is "clean break"

At this point I'm looking for what's known as a "clean break".  Clean break is when the curd jells to the point that sticking a knife or finger into the mixture breaks freely without sticking or coating.  It may take more or less than 40 minutes to achieve this, but the process can't move on until this clean break is achieved.  

Cutting the curd

Step 4: Cutting the curd.

After the clean break is achieved I put the jug back into the water bath again just to help maintain the temperature and make it easy for me to cut the curd.  Typically a long cheese knife is used for this but I don't have a long knife.  You could use any long implement.  A cake frosting knife would work well, but I don't have one of those either.  I used a chopstick.  Typically you cut the curd into small pieces in a grid pattern, but that wasn't really working for me so I just cut randomly until all the curd was in 1/4" pieces.

Step 5: Bring up the temperature.

The trick here is to apply heat just fast enough to heat the mixture from 95°F to 100°F over the span of 30 minutes.  Adding near boiling water to the water bath about 1 cup at a time allowed me to control this temperature rise.  Keep stirring the curd so they do not clump together and so the mixture heats evenly.

Separating the curd from the whey

Step 6: Separating the curd.

I lined my cheesecloth over a colander and set that in a mixing bowl.  I poured the curds and whey into the colander and lifted the cheese cloth to separate the curd.  The whey can be used in breads, as a soup stock base, put in smoothies, or made into ricotta cheese.

Step 7: Molding the curd.

Now it's starting to look like cheese!  I took the drained curd and placed it in the cheese mold.  I folded the excess cheese cloth on top and added the pressing plate following the schedule below:

- Press with 11lbs for 10 minutes

- Break up the curds into small pieces

- Press with 17lbs for 15 minutes

- Break up the curds into small pieces

- Press with 44lbs for 24 hours

Pressing the curd

There are very expensive cheese presses available online for ~$250 but I find that those are unnecessary.  I used my hot liquor tank again along with a 28oz can of tomatoes and a wood floor plank leftover from remodeling my main floor.  I put the can of tomatoes on the pressing plate to create room for my hot liquor tank.  I placed the wood plank on top of the tomatoes to create a more stable base and then set the tank on top of that.  The contraption weighed 10 lbs.  I then added the appropriate amount of water to reach the correct pressing weight.  Since water weighs 8.33lbs/gallon I needed ~1 cup for the 11lb pressing, another 11.5 cups for the 17 lb pressing and another 3.25 gallons (4 gallons total) for the 44lb pressing.  The system was still a bit unstable so I held it in place with buckets of water placed on each side to keep it from tipping over.

Brining the cheese

Step 8: Brining/Salting.

After the 24 hour pressing, I took the cheese out of the press and unwrapped it from its cheesecloth and placed it into a brine solution.  The solution was made of 1.5 liters of water, 300 grams of salt, and a teaspoon of white vinegar brought to a boil and cooled to room temperature.  The cheese sat in the brine solution for 24 hours and was flipped every 6 hours to assure an even brine.

Step 9: Ageing.

The cheese was removed from the brine solution, patted dry, and set in a cool place to age.  The temperature recommended by the recipe I used was 55°F.  My basement was cool, but not quite that cool so I again utilized my hot liquor tank.  I placed my cheese mold in the bottom of the tank and surrounded it with some ice.  I placed the cheese on top of the cheese mold.  The holes in the cheese mold allow air access to the bottom of the cheese.  

Aging the cheese in a cooler lined at the
bottom with ice to keep it cool.

Optimal humidity is 80-98% so the melting ice should be able to provide this in addition to keeping the environment cool.  I loosely placed the lid on the top without screwing it down and opened the drain port to allow for some airflow and excess water to drain.  

The cheese will be flipped daily for 2 weeks and then weekly from then on out.  I'm still ageing this cheese but I plan on eating it at Thanksgiving dinner which would be an age of 8 weeks.  The aging window for Bra is 8-26 weeks.  Eight weeks gives a softer cheese known as Bra Tenero and this progresses to a harder cheese called Bra Duro as the ageing gets closer to 6 months.

Overall my first attempt at making cheese seems to have been a success.  We will find out when the time comes to eat it.  Maybe it will taste like a sweaty gym sock, but I suspect it will be much better than that.  Just as in homebrewing, sanitation is key.  A clean cheese, is a happy cheese.  If you currently homebrew, it is an easy jump to cheese making.  Two delicious products: two fun hobbies.  They even pair well together.  When I finally taste this one, I'll be sure to provide tasting notes and pairing suggestions.

Note: I put the leftover milk/cream in my stand mixer with the whip attachment and set it to high.  I added a generous tablespoon of sugar and let it "whip" for a couple minutes.  There wasn't enough fat to make whipped cream, but it did make a milkshake-like drink.  Thick.  Creamy.  Sweet.  Delicious.  Good on its own or add to your morning coffee.