Debbie in Italy, Part 2: Fresh Pecorino

This is the second post from Debbie Driscoll documenting what she learned in Italy last Fall. Debbie, owner of Debbie's Delicious Cheese, teaches home cheesemaking classes in Portland and beyond. You can find a listing of her upcoming classes at debbiesdeliciouscheese.com.

Base Recipe: Pecorino Fresco Bianco
(This is the base recipe for most of Podere Paugnano's other cheeses and I'll refer to it in all other pecorino entries.)

One of the simplest and the freshest cheese made at Podere Paugnano was their Pecorino Fresco Bianco, which translates to Fresh White Sheep-Milk Cheese. It is fresh and white because it hasn't had a chance to develop any rind. They used the same recipe for the Fresco Bianco as for their aged cheeses, but stored it at a cooler temperature and sold it within 10 days of production.

All sheep milk cheeses are called pecorino. In Italian pecora means sheep, and pecorino is the name for any sheep milk cheese. You'll see in this recipe and the recipes that follow that pecorino cheeses in Italy come in a much, much wider variety than pecorino in the US, where pecorino usually refers to a variety aged 12 months or more so that it is hard enough for grating. At least 95% of what the Porcus produced was aged less than a year.

One thing you'll notice right away about the recipe is that it does not call for any starter culture. Podere Paugnano produced all organic, raw cheeses and did not use any cultures, which is the traditional method of pecorino production. Even the other creamery I visited was surprised at this technique. It is surprising because it is somewhat risky from a health and consistency perspective: starter cultures tend to crowd out any less-desired or harmful bacteria in the milk and also impart a fairly consistent flavor. And yet this technique allows the terrior to shine through.

Ingredients:
12 liters raw sheep milk
7 g rennet dissolved in water just before adding to milk

Notes:
- They used animal rennet in paste form or vegetable rennet in liquid form, depending on the batch
- The rennets used in Italy are 1:20,000 (single strength) and 1:10,0000 (double strength) while the rennet we use in the US is typically 1:15,000 (single strength) and 1:7,500 (double strength). So for this recipe, 7g of single strength Italian rennet is equal to 9 1/3g of single strength American rennet.

Instructions:
1. Heat milk to 40C.
2. Add rennet and stir for 1 minute.
3. Let set for 20 minutes, or until clean break (I was visiting at the end of the lactation cycle and due to the impact of the sheep's hormonal changes on the coagulation properties of the milk it took about an hour for the milk to set. So the set time can vary tremendously based on season.)
4. Cut curd into corn size pieces, then continue to agitate for 15 minutes, maintaining the curd at 38-40C the entire time.
5. Pour into molds (no leader needed). (They typically used approximately 8-inch high, 8-inch diameter molds)
6. Use hands to press curd in molds and expel whey. As curds compress, add more curd and repress so that curd is level or nearly level with top of mold.
7. Maintain temperature of curd at 38-40C while allowing to drain freely for 45 minutes. The Porcus used a covered draining table that they filled with steam.
8. Flip cheese in the mold. (No need to apply pressure again.)
9. Return to 38-40C environment for 45 minutes.
10. Flip again.
11. Return to 38-40C environment for 20 minutes.
12. Keep cheese in molds and transfer to room temperature rack. Store at room temperature for 1 day.
13. After the day at room temperature, unmold, flip, apply a thin coating of salt to the surface of the cheese and return to mold. Let sit for 5 hours per kilogram of cheese. (For example, if you have a 1 kg cheese, let salt sit on cheese for 5 hours. If you have a 2 kg cheese, let salt sit on cheese for 10 hours.)
14. After the salt has absorbed for the appropriate amount of time, unmold and rinse salt from cheese.
15. Place unmolded cheese in 8C environment for up to 10 days.


Tool used for curd cutting as well as agitating the curd after cutting


Pressing the curd and then adding more curd to each mold as the curd level dropped due to whey expulsion.


Final hand pressing of the curd.


Flipping the cheese


The "fresh cheese" aging room, kept at 8C

Pecorino Fresco Abbucciato
This is a fresh sheep milk cheese "with skin" (abbucciato). It is made using the exact same recipe as Pecorino Fresco Bianco, but oiled (to aid in rind development) and aged longer.

Instructions:
Follow steps 1-14 in the Base Recipe: Pecorino Fresco Bianco.
15. After 10 days of aging at 8C, apply a thin coating of olive oil to the cheese. This is an optional step. Alternately, Giovanna mentioned that she sometimes likes to coat with tomato juice instead of olive oil.
16. Return to 8C storage for up to 3 months.
17. Wash mold from cheese with water and pat dry before cutting/serving.


Oiling the cheese after 10 days aging. These wheels will then return to the aging room for further aging. (Two unidentified types of pecorino are being oiled in this photo.)"


Pecorino Fresco Abbucciato ready for sale

Pecorino Erborinato
This recipe is for a sheep milk blue cheese, but I have no idea what makes it blue. I watched Giovanni make a batch of this and he didn't add any molds or culture and they don't poke any holes in it. When it does get some blue, it's only a small amount (as far as I could see in the wheels they broke open while I was there). I found that I particularly enjoyed the flavor of this cheese because it was not too sheepy and had a creamy flavor.

The instructions are identical to the Base Recipe: Pecorino Fresco Bianco, but with slight changes in all of the target temperatures and a longer aging period. Even though this is aged for up to 4 months, the Porcus still considered this a fresh cheese. I think this was mainly because it was aged in the 8C cave with the other fresh cheese.

Instructions:
1. Heat milk to 38C.
2. Add rennet and stir for 1 minute.
3. Let set for 20 minutes, or until clean break.
4. Cut curd into corn size pieces, then continue to agitate for 15 minutes, maintaining the curd at 43C the entire time.
5. Pour into molds (no leader needed). (They typically used approximately 8-inch high, 8-inch diameter molds)
6. Use hands to press curd in molds and expel whey. As curds compress, add more curd and repress so that curd is level or nearly level with top of mold.
7. Maintain temperature of curd at 30C while allowing to drain freely for 45 minutes. The Porcus used a covered draining table that they filled with steam.
8. Flip cheese in the mold. (No need to apply pressure again.)
9. Return to 30C environment for 45 minutes.
10. Flip again.
11. Return to 30C environment for 20 minutes.
12. Keep cheese in molds and transfer to room temperature rack. Store at room temperature for 1 day.
13. After the day at room temperature, unmold, flip, apply a medium coating of salt to the surface of the cheese and return to mold. Let sit for 5 hours per kilogram of cheese. (For example, if you have a 1 kg cheese, let salt sit on cheese for 5 hours. If you have a 2 kg cheese, let salt sit on cheese for 10 hours.)
14. After the salt has absorbed for the appropriate amount of time, unmold and rinse salt from cheese.
15. Place unmolded cheese in 8C environment for 10 days.
16. After 10 days at 8C, apply a thin coating of oil.
17. Return to the 8C environment for 1 to 4 months.
18. Wash mold from cheese with water and pat dry before cutting/serving.


The salting step for a batch of erborinato

Debbie in Italy, Part 1: Cheese Voyeur in Italy

Debbie Driscoll, who has become my partner in cheese crime, visited Italian cheesemakers last fall. We spoke of her trip during our last podcast, where she also promised to post blog articles on her trip here on this blog. I am happy to present the first entry on her trip.

This past autumn, fueled purely by a passion for cheesemaking, I quit my jetsetting job at a design consultancy in Portland, OR and headed to Italy to apprentice (a.k.a. volunteer as a migrant worker) at a pecorino formaggeria in Tuscany. While there, I managed to land a second gig at a buffalo and cow milk cheese producer in Jesi, Italy.

This was too good of an experience not to share with the greater cheesemaking community, so through this blog I’ll share everything I can about the experience - the recipes, tools and techniques from the two creameries where I was lucky enough to make cheese alongside masters of the craft.

But first I should answer the two questions I get asked most often when I tell others about my experience. Why cheesemaking? Why Italy?

At the time of my trip I was honestly at a loss to explain, but after months of impassioned cheesemaking plus some space to ruminate, my mind slowly made sense of what felt like a primal need to make cheese.

My original career choice was product design - a degree program that offered a perfect balance of thinking and making. The path I wound up following in the decade since graduation resulted in countless PowerPoint decks, an encyclopedia worth of carefully crafted email communications, and what felt like a barely perceptible role (by the time the product hit the shelf) in the production of printers, air conditioners, and credit cards. As a manager of the people designing these products, it was hard to put my finger on what I did every day since there was little if anything to physically show for my work.

In cheesemaking, my day-long efforts resulted in something that could be consumed through all the senses. It fed my needs for craft and gave me something to “show” for my work that could be appreciated by others. To my surprise, it also required an incredible amount of thinking. I found myself so wrapped up in dosage conversions, acidity titrations and discerning which strains of bacteria to use that I was unable to talk at times, much to my husband’s consternation.

My choice to study in Italy was a little less philosophical. In early 2010 my sabbatical was approaching (I hadn’t yet decided to leave my job). Combining my cheesemaking hobby with some travel seemed like an ideal sabbatical pursuit. I had already traveled a good bit in France can’t stand to eat goat cheese, so France didn’t seem like the best option. I love cheddar cheese, but heading to England didn’t seem like as much of an adventure as I was hoping for. On the other hand, Italians make great non-goaty cheese and I’d never been there. And with that logic worked out, I became a woman on a mission to find cheesemakers in Italy.

After months of looking for ways to make contact, an employee at The Cheese Bar recommended looking into the organizations Farm Exchange and World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming (WWOOF), both of which are organizations that connect farms in need of an extra hand with volunteers who want to work on farms. WWOOF had many more cheesemakers on their list so I paid $35 to join the Italian chapter and began sending emails to all the cheesemakers without goats.

After receiving several notes explaining that the sheep weren’t going to be producing any milk at the time of my visit (learning #1: lactation cycles of sheep) and no replies for cow owners, one family replied that if I got my tookus there quickly I’d get to do some cheesemaking with them before their herd went dry for the season.

I had just left my job the week before, so I was free to flit off to Italy. So I booked a ticket, checked out a stack of Italian language learning books from the library, and 3.5 weeks later was on a flight to Rome.

After about 36 hours of air, train, subway and bus travel, I arrived just past nightfall to Podere Paugnano in Radicondoli, Tuscany, about 30 miles west of Siena. I was welcomed by owners Giovanni and Giovanna Porcu, along with their daughters Tamara and Natalie.


Giovanna and Giovanni, my kind and wonderful hosts in Radicondoli, Tuscany


Entrance to Giovanni and Giovanna's Agrotourismo (working farm bed and breakfast) and Cheese Shop


The Porcu's herd of Sardenian milk sheep.


The Formaggeria (cheese shop)

In addition to 300 Sardinian milk sheep and the formaggeria, Podere Paugnano includes an agrotourismo (a working farm bed and breakfast), a variety of farm animals and a by-reservation restaurant of sorts in which Giovanna prepared phenomenal five- to seven-course meals for local or international guests in her kitchen.

After nearly two weeks of working and studying at Podere Paugnano, one of their agrotourismo guests very kindly arranged my second apprenticeship with his sister- and brother-in-law, Giulia and Antonio Trionfi, who run Caseificio Piandelmedico in Jesi (Ancona province) near the Adriatic coast.


Caseificio Piandelmedico


A buffalo calf that was born on the first day I arrived

Antonio managed the feed and care of their 150 Asian water buffalo and 150 milk cows (of varying breeds) while Giulia, with assistance from her husband Chris, managed the creamery. They produced milk, mozzarella, yogurt, and a wide range of fresh and aged cheeses.

I kept a separate blog of my travel experiences along with the many amazing Italian food recipes I learned from Giovanna, including quite a few that utilized their outstanding pecorino cheeses, at www.brettanddebbie.com (see the September and October 2010 archives).

In this blog I will focus on cheesemaking techniques and the recipes I learned at Podere Paugnano and Caseificio Piandelmedico. I’ve been able to test nearly all of the recipes I learned at Piandelmedico, but am still looking for sheep milk so I can try out the recipes from Podere Paugnano. Please let me know if you have a connection or if you are able to give the recipes a try!

My hope is that this blog comes alive with comments, experiences and suggestions from the readers and cheesemakers out there. Let the discussion begin!

Retro-fitting a mini-refrigerator article in Culture Magazine

I came home last night to find the Spring 2011 issue of Culture Magazine in my mailbox, which I am proud to say has my article on converting a mini-refrigerator into a cheese cave by adding an external thermostat control. The article is not online, but you can check it out in the magazine by flipping to the the "Can-do" section.

Homegrown Rennet

I call myself an obsessed home cheesemaker, and perhaps to prove my point I decided this last summer to try to grow my own rennet and use it to make my own cheese. A milk coagulating enzyme can be extracted from certain thistle flowers, including the cardoon thistle. I grew six of these thistles from seed to nearly four foot high plants in soil that has otherwise been unused between the sidewalk and the street. The cardoon is related to the artichoke and apparently you can eat the young flowers. I may try cooking a few, but my primary goal was to harvest the purple stamens in which the milk coagulating enzymes are found.

How do you extract the rennet from the thistle? A Google search for "Thistle Rennet" turns up pages that reference the book "The Encyclopedia of Country Living:
An Old Fashioned Recipe Book" by Carla Emery. This book recommends the following:

Gather the thistle flowers when they have turned brown. If you see thistledown, the plant is over-mature. Get it right after the end of bloom and before the stage where down blows away. Air dry the flowers.

This confused me because everything I had read and heard on the subject indicated that the purple stamens were the part of the plant that held the rennet. Not wanting to waste my thistle or my expensive raw milk, I sent an email to cheesemaker Alyce Birchenough of Sweet Home Farm. Alyce was mentioned in a spring 2010 Culture Magazine article on thistle based rennet cheeses and she was kind enough to reply to my query with information she received when watching the cheesemaking procedure in Italy:

Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) is commonly used in Spain and Portugal as a vegetal rennet to coagulate sheep milk cheese. The following notes were obtained at Corfilac in Ragusa, Sicily at Cheese Art 2006 at a hands on demonstration workshop.

The part of the cardoon used to coagulate milk for cheesemaking is the lavender stamens that appear when the plant is in bloom. The stamens may be plucked or cut away from the base with a knife. The stamens should be dried at room temperature for about 3 weeks with periodic stirring to prevent mold growth. The dried stamens will keep for 2 years.

In a mortar and pestle or a blender grind the cardoon stamens to a powder. Suggested use rate is 1 gram of dried flower per liter of milk. The ground stamen should be steeped in room temperature water at the rate of 1 gram stamen to 10 ml water. Steep the mixture for 30 minutes. Strain through a paper filter before use. Add to the ripened milk at 30 C or 86F. i.e. 100 ml solution for 10 liters of milk. Coagulation should occur in 30- 45 minutes. Fresh flowers may also be used and the usage may be slightly reduced since the activity is stronger when fresh. This coagulant is more proteolytic and will produce a softer cheese.Proceed with the make procedure as desired.

This information made a lot more sense to me, and it had precise measurements to follow. I was very excited and I decided to modify a Camembert recipe to use this rennet.

Thistle based rennet produces a bitter flavor if used with cow milk if the cheese is not eaten within a few days. This is because unlike traditional rennet enzymes, which only trim off the ends of the milk casin proteins, thistle rennet cleaves the casin proteins at many points. In cow milk this results in a bitter flavor, but not in goat or sheep milk. Therefore I was destined to make my first goat milk cheese.

I obtained two gallons of goat milk from a local goat farm called Terra Farma, and I used 1.5 gallons to make cardoon cheese. The remaining half gallon became fresh chevre, a recipe I in which had some confidence and therefore guaranteed me at least one good cheese from my first experiment with goat milk. The milk had a slight hint of the "barnyardy" flavor, which I associate with goat milk, but otherwise seemed very fresh.

I calculated that 1.5 gallons is about 7 liters of milk, and so should require about 7 grams of dried stamens according to the above research. I was using fresh stamens, so I reasoned I would not need as much, however since the stamens were fresh they contained more water, and therefore would weigh more than the equivalent dried amount. Furthermore my kitchen scale was not sensitive enough to accurately measure this small amount of thistle. I was reduced to guessing that the purple trimmings of two full thistles would be about 7 grams in weight, and would do the job. Apparently it was.

I ground up the stamens with a pestle and mortar, and mixed with 70 ml of boiled and cooled water. I allowed the mixture to steep for 30 minutes while my milk was culturing, then I filtered it through a coffee filter and used it as just as regular rennet.

I must mention that lack of sanitation of this process had me a little concerned. The thistles came in fresh from the garden where the local honey bees had just been busily rooting around in them searching for nectar. I was concerned about deactivating the enzyme and so I used no sanitizers on the thistles other than a rinse in tap water before cutting. A little bit of the local bacterial fauna is bound to get in one’s homemade cheese, and might impart a local flavor unique to the cheesemaker. If any of my cheeses were going to have a local flavor, this would be one.

I modified a Camembert recipe for use with this cheese, as I wanted something that would age quickly. I did not add mold spores to the cheese, as I would for Camembert, as I wanted any flavors derived from the rennet to not be overpowered. I understand that the proteolysis, or protein splitting properties of thistle rennet tends to create a runny cheese. This reminded me of the runny center of Camembert, which is why I choose it as my starting point.

To 1.5 gallons of goat milk warmed to 86F I added 4 ounces of frozen mesophilic culture and I allowed this to culture for 45 minutes. Then I added the 70 ml of rennet prepared as described above. 45 minutes later, I checked the milk to find it nicely coagulated. I was very pleased with myself. Until this point I strongly suspected that this was not going to work, and I was very excited this was not the case.

I cut the curd to 1 inch cubes, allowed them to heal for 10 minutes, then stirred gently for 20 more minutes, all while keeping the milk at 86F. After stirring I let the curds settle and mat, and then transferred to round molds on top of draining mats. As I would for Camembert, I did not press the cheese, but rather flipped the molds at regular intervals, allowing the curds to mat under their own weight.

After 24 hours of draining, I removed the molds. They cheeses started to barrel immediately. The sides bowed outward and the cheese could not hold its own shape now that the walls of the mold were no longer keeping it confined. I feared that I had not extracted enough whey from the curds during cooking. When I repeat this experiment, I will probably cut to smaller 1/2 inch cubes, or even smaller. To keep the cheeses from barreling too much I wrapped them with a strip of cheesecloth similar to the wrapping I had seen on traditional thistle cheeses in the spring issue of Culture Magazine. Apparently this is a traditional wrapping to keep the cheese whole as the proteolytic enzymes in the thistle rennet turn the center of the cheese very runny.

Since the cheeses seemed too moist I decided to let them dry for two days at room temperature. Then I moved them to my wine refrigerator turned aging cave. Normally I keep cheese in some sort of container in this wine refrigerator because its circulation fans tent to dry out the cheese. This time I waited a week before transferring them to containers, again because I felt the cheeses were too moist.

As I write this, the cheeses have been aging two weeks. One has dried out quite a bit more than I would like while the other one seems perfect except for a little bit of blue mold, which I wiped off with a mixture of vinegar and salt. I hope to age these for at least 6 weeks before trying them, but I will have to keep a closer eye on them from now on. Stay tuned for future updates.

Culture Magazine

My first article has just been published in Culture Magazine's fall issue. Follow the link for the online version of the article.

Cheese-A-Topia Snapshots

I have been running around the American Cheese Society 2010 conference with my fancy camera having a blast. I just found time before breakfast on the last day to post some pictures. More to come...

Home Yogurt Making

Yogurt falls into the category of "dairy product," a category that also includes cheese, butter, crème fraiche, and kefir, among other things. While it is not cheese, it fits nicely into the discussion of home cheesemaking because making yogurt is identical to culturing cheese, and you get to skip all of those complicated (but fun!) chores like cutting curds, pressing, and aging.

Yogurt is simply milk which has been fermented by a cocktail of lactic bacteria. Yogurt cultures prefer temperatures near 115°F, much warmer than mesophilic cultures which prefer the 85-90°F range. There is some overlap in bacterial species between thermophilic cheese cultures and yogurt culture, and in a pinch you can use yogurt in place of thermophilic culture to make cheese, though the results will not be identical. Technical facts aside, what this simply means is that if you heat milk to 115°F, add some commercial yogurt with active cultures, and maintain the temperature for 12-16 hours you can turn 8 oz of yogurt into 2 quarts overnight.

In Alton Brown's Good Eats episode "Good Milk Gone Bad," Alton describes his mad scientist method of making yogurt which involves a clear container, a heating pad, and a trash can (he demonstrates this and other gadgets on a spot on David Letterman).

Being the devoted AB fan that I am, I constructed my own incubator using a flower vase, a heating pad, a towel, a digital thermometer and a light dimmer. It makes fantastic yogurt, but I have to admit it is not something I would recommend to someone who doesn't like tinkering with things like I do.

It occurred to me recently that rather than leading a prospective yogurt maker down the mad scientist path described above, you could keep milk warm overnight using the same method I have been using to culture cheese starter: Keeping a jar of inoculated milk in a picnic cooler filled with warm water. Basically you just warm the milk up to about 5°F higher than your target temperature and place in a picnic cooler with water of the same temperature. Over the course of incubation the temperature will drop slowly (the cooler does a pretty good job at maintaining heat), and for the majority of the time it will be in the right range.

So here is my recommended method for making yogurt at home, using easy to find items and no mad scientist contraptions. This method uses the microwave to heat the milk, which is my favorite method since it is easy to control and does not dirty a saucepan, but you can also heat the milk carefully on the stove if you like. If you can use more yogurt, mix up two jars instead of just one.

Homemade Yogurt

Equipment:

• 1 clean one quart mason jar with lid (either standard canning lid or a white plastic freezer lid)
• Dairy thermometer or kitchen thermometer in the 70-120°F range
• Metal spoon that fits into jar and reaches to bottom
• 1 small mixing bowl in which you can place the thermometer and spoon when you are not using them.
• Picnic cooler large enough to hold the jar standing up

Ingredients:

• 4 ounces of yogurt labeled as containing active cultures (you can also use yogurt from a previous batch), or 1 packet of freeze dried yogurt starter
• 1 quart of milk (2% or whole works well)
• 1/2 cup of dried milk powder
• Optional: 2 tablespoons of honey
• Optional: 1 teaspoon vanilla

Method:

All equipment should be clean before starting.

Sterilize the jar and lid by filling the jar to the rim boiling water and putting on the lid. Being careful not to burn yourself, open the jar and sterilize the spoon placing it in jar for 2 minutes. Sterilize the mixing bowl and thermometer by filling the bowl with boiling water, running the water over the probe of the thermometer while filling the bowl. After 2 minutes, pour out the jar and the bowl. Set the spoon and thermometer in the bowl when you are not using them so they do not get contaminated.

Add milk to the jar until it is about 3/4 of the way full. Place jar in microwave and heat on high power for 1 minute, then remove, stir with spoon and check the temperature with thermometer. Return to microwave and heat again for 20 seconds, then stir and check temperature again. Repeat until the milk is 120°F. Place lid on jar.

Add dry milk and stir. Add the yogurt or starter and stir. Add the honey and vanilla, if using, for a sweeter yogurt.

Fill picnic cooler with hot water from the faucet. As you are filling, insert the thermometer in the cooler and adjust faucet until the water in the cooler is 120°F. Fill the cooler until the water level is equal to the height of the milk in the jar when the jar is inserted. Do not let the water come over the top of the jar or let the jar fall over.

Place cooler in a location where it will not be disturbed and insert the jar. Close the lid and let the yogurt incubate for 12 to 16 hours, until it is thick. Transfer the yogurt to the refrigerator and use within 2 to 3 weeks.