table talk / By Simona Carini

Say Cheese — Again

More on making cheese at home

(April 7, 2011) “Cheese is one of the great achievements of humankind. Not any cheese in particular, but cheese in its astonishing multiplicity, created anew every day in the dairies of the world.”

— Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking

homemade Jarlsberg PHOTO BY SIMONA CARINI

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The multiplicity of cheese is astonishing and can be intimidating if you’re learning to make cheese by carrying out small-scale experiments in the kitchen. In a previous article, “Say Homemade Cheese” (Table Talk, Feb. 24), I suggested some cheeses whose simple production allows relatively easy access to the world of home cheesemaking. If you’ve tried a couple of those cheeses, now you can explore further with more complex varieties.

Time is an important variable in cheesemaking. When you are considering a recipe, make sure you read it through, not only to verify that you have all the ingredients and tools necessary but also to see how time is allocated in it. Periods of activity, which require full and undivided attention, alternate with periods of alert waiting. During the “alert” waiting, you don’t need to stand next to your cheese-in-the-making, but you do need to be aware of what is happening and how long the current conditions are to be maintained. A good example is when you are waiting for the milk to coagulate.

“Milk coagulation is the most exciting moment of cheesemaking,” say Jody M. Farnham and Marc Druart in The Joy of Cheesemaking. Or, as Sarah-Kate Lynch in Blessed Are the Cheesemakers puts it, this is when “you realize that your milk is gone and your cheese is on its way.”

Getting to coagulation takes a few steps: 1) Milk is brought to a certain temperature. 2) Starter culture (good bacteria) is added to the milk. 3) Rennet is added to the milk. (There are exceptions to the last two steps: for example, when either lemon juice or vinegar is used to coagulate the milk.)

After coagulation is achieved, different techniques are employed to remove a certain amount of moisture from the cheese curds; details depend on the kind of cheese being made. For example, I recently made English-style Coulommiers. Once the curd was formed, I used a slotted spoon to ladle thin slices of it into a Camembert mold (4-1/4” wide and 4-1/4” high). After filling the mold, I waited for some drainage to occur, then refilled, and so on, until all the curd was used. After the designated time, I flipped over the cheese in the mold, then allowed it to drain longer. A sprinkling of salt on the surfaces completed the making of this cheese.

For another example I’ll go back in time to my salad days of cheese making: After producing a couple of soft, unripened cheeses, I followed my heart and headed straight for the land of hard cheese. The move entailed investment in a cheese press, which allows the application of weight in a controlled fashion. (A person with DIY skills can actually build a cheese press.)

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