Sunset on Home Cheesemaking

In the February edition of Sunset Magazine I was delighted to see an article on making your own cheese at home. They obtained recipes from two established artisan cheesemakers and presented Cowgirl Creamery's Fromage Blanc and Bellwether Farms' Ricotta.

I was extremely excited to see a mainstream magazine touch on the home cheesemaking phenomenon. I was even more excited that they were hosting a contest for readers to create recipes using these cheeses, with a prize of tickets to California's Artisan Cheese Festival. I have discovered that I love to create recipes from scratch, it really gets the mad scientist in me going.

I entered a cheese desert, in the shape of a cocktail, turning the Cowgirl Creamery's Fromage Blanc into a "Sweet Cowgirl Cheesecake Cocktail."

You can download my Cheese Cocktail recipe here. If you make it let me know what you think. I thought it was a pretty good use of Fromage Blanc, which was one of the easiest cheeses I have attempted.

I also tried to make a savory dish with the ricotta by baking it whole. Sadly it unexpectedly burned in the oven. I will have to work a bit longer on getting that one right.

Rennet from a Thistle?

I met Jon Clark at a recent cheese class where he was a student. Jon is currently teaching English in Hungary. Though he is really interested in making cheese, he does not have the luxury of being able to order ingredients over the internet and have them arrive in a timely or economical fashion.

We discussed that it is possible to harvest your own rennet, and I forwarded him a link to another obsessed cheesemaker, David B. Fankhauser. Dr. Fankhauser shows his attempt to create his own rennet from the stomach of a suckling kid (the goat kind). I thought if Jon were really desperate, this was something that he could try. If seeing where your food comes from does not disturb you, check it out here.

Jon replied and told me he had coincidentally just seen that very page in a recent posting to the blog Serious Eats. In this entry Jake Lahne discusses the use of the Cardoon Thistle as a cheesemaking coagulant.

I have read in American Farmstead Cheese that thistle was used in historic cheesemaking when animal rennet was not available or not desired. Jewish cheesemakers used thistle to create a kosher cheese (avoiding mixing meat and milk). Some cheeses are still made today using this process: Torta la Serena, Torta del Casar, and Serra da Estrela are examples.

I am very curious about trying to use Cardoon as a coagulant. My favorite seed company carries it, so I will try planting some this year. Stay tuned for results this summer/fall.

Making Feta at Home

For my first live demonstration I chose to make Feta cheese since it was relatively easy and a perfect rennet coagulated cheese for the beginning cheesemaker to tackle. I wanted to discuss the results from using live starter culture instead of direct acidification, show what a clean break looks like, and walk through the process of cutting and cooking curds. I felt the demonstration went really well, and strangely no one complained about my long winded food science talk of enzymes and proteins. Blogger "Food and Books and Stuff" posted a lovely review on her blog.

I adapted a Feta recipe I received in the class "A Practical Introduction to Cheesemaking" which I took at Oregon State University. I added an introduction that covered home cheesemaking equipment and sanitation, edited it until it fit on the front and back of a single sheet of paper, and used the results as a handout. You can download it from the Joy of Home Cheesemaking site for your own first attempt at rennet coagulated cheese.

Due to the leftovers from the class and the trial makes I did in preparation, my family has a lot of Feta to consume. Weekends are my turn to make dinner, so I am making Spanakopita.

The Homebrew Exchange

The owners of The Homebrew Exchange let me know a little while back that they were having an open house today, and the thought never occurred to me that it would be worth re-posting the invite. Talk about late notice, I apologize.

Anyway, if you see this post today, and happen to be in the neighborhood, drop in and say hi. I will be there with some sample feta cheese that I made for my demonstration next Wednesday. The owners of The Homebrew Exchange are super nice and they are showing a real commitment to carrying cheesemaking supplies. I was really excited to have another place in town to send people who need supplies.

The Homebrew Exchange is located at 1907 N Kilpatrick St, Portland, OR 97217, and the open house starts at 4 p.m. Here is a direct link to the announcement on their web site.

DIY Cheesemakers in Portland

Portland has a great food community, including enough cheese enthusiasts to warrant a loosely formed organization of home cheesemakers called the DIY Cheesemakers. This group has been meeting at a great local cheese shop called Foster and Dobbs Authentic Foods.

I attended my first meeting last November and met Gayle Starbuck, who led a class on making fresh cheeses with direct set cultures. She and I talked after the class and I agreed to help set up an email list to help communicate between the meeting participants. That list now lives as a Google group, which can be found at diycheese.org.

I also talked to Luan Schooler after the same DIY meeting. Luan is one of the owners of Foster and Dobbs, and from what I can tell she started hosting the DIY meetings in 2008. I offered to do a cheesemaking demonstration. After an exchange of emails, I am now demonstrating making Feta on January 20th, 2010. I am very excited.

This weekend I have plans to visit a local goat farm to acquire some fresh raw milk and do a trial cheesemaking run at home. If the results are good, they will show up at the meeting on the 20th. I am also going to do a practice run with store bought cow milk to hopefully show the difference between the two milk sources. The demo will done with store bought milk, as that is what most people will be using in their own kitchens.

So if you are in the Portland area, come join the fun. See the details at diycheese.org.

Not all Muensters go to heaven

I really like washed rind cheeses. So for our first podcast, Jeff Cowan and I followed a recipe for Muenster cheese which had us include b.linens along with the starter culture. A week later, I learned while taking the class at OSU (see previous post) that b.linens need oxygen to thrive and it is better to be applied to the outside of the cheese along with a 10% salt solution during the washing phase (I also learned that washed rind cheeses are one of the harder cheeses to get right). So when I returned from the class I drenched my Meunster cheeses with a 10% brine innoculated with b.linens. I left the surface dripping wet, which I fear may have been one of my many mistakes.

After 4 weeks I had a surface that was very slimy, with a strong Limburger smell.

There was no characteristic orange growth except for one spot on the smaller of the two cheeses.

I posted in cheeseforum.org a request for advice and a little feedback, the best of which came from user francois who stated that I did not have b.linens growing, but instead a strong yeast infection. According to him, the smell I thought was coming from b.linen growth was coming from protein breakdown due to the yeast.

I tried scraping off the layer of slime and re-washing with a brine solution.

I went on vacation for a week, and when I returned I found a very smelly, slimy mess of a cheese. The smaller cheese had grown some blue mold and the larger was slimy again. Slicing into the larger cheese revealed a firmer paste and more horrible smell. I braced myself and tasted it. Extremely strong and unpleasant ammonia flavors forced me put my open mouth under the kitchen faucet to try to rinse foul substance out of my mouth. This was a home cheesemaking attempt gone horribly wrong.



I will attempt this again in a couple of months, and try to avoid the pitfalls I encountered this time around.

On the encouraging side, the Camemberts I brought home from the OSU class (rescued from going to waste) have turned out fantastic. They seem to need a bit more salt for my taste, but they are runny and have the right flavor. Now I need to give a lot of them away, as they probably only have a couple of weeks of perfect ripeness in them.

Anyone need some cheese?

A Practical Introduction to Cheesemaking at Oregon State University

This week I took part in an OSU extension class called "Practical Introduction to Cheesemaking" (See flyer here). The class was led by Dr. Lisbeth Goddik of OSU with Marc Bates, former Creamery Operator and Manager for Washington State University Creamery. The class was a basic introduction to cheesemaking, aimed at the entrepreneur interested in starting a commercial artisan cheese plant. Despite this, the class was encouraged to ask questions as technical or advanced as they wanted, and the instructors were very happy to scale down the topics to the home cheesemaker.

I also really enjoyed being with about 20 other students as interested in cheesemaking as I am. One of my only regrets is not getting more contact information from my classmates (if one of you are reading this entry, and want to be added to my rolodex, please mail me at contact@joyofcheesemaking.com). There were chefs interested in making cheese at their restaurants, dairy owners interested in making cheese from their livestock, people really interested in starting up a creamer, and home cheesemakers like me trying to get really serious about the hobby.

We practiced making cheese in the OSU Cheese Pilot Plant. This was very exciting, as we were working with commercial scale equipment. See the flicker stream linked in the photo above (and more photos will be coming soon).

I learned so many interesting tidbits of cheesemaking knowledge that I thought I would use this blog entry as a notepad to jot them down for my own personal reference and to share with the web world. Check back and watch the list below expand as I get the time to add more entries. If you were in the class feel free to add your own in the comments section, and I can add them to this list.

• Chlorine is used as a sanitizer commercially at a level that equipment does not have to be rinsed after sanitation. This is in the 80-100 ppm (parts per million) level. Chlorine is inactivated by contact with organic material, such as milk. As soon as the chlorine touches the milk it is inactivated and will not affect bacterial cultures, molds, or rennet added to the cheese milk. Marc Bates gave us a good trick of adding a few drops of milk to the container holding the water into which you are going to dilute the rennet to inactivate any residual sanitizer. The milk will not coagulate because it is at such low concentration.
  
  I found this site which shows that a 200 ppm Cl solution can be achieved by adding bleach to water in a 124 to 1 ratio. There are 768 teaspoons in a gallon, so this is equivalent to 6.2 teaspoons per gallon. To get 80 ppm, you need approximately 2.5 teaspoons bleach per gallon. I use a 32 ounce spray bottle (picked up from a hardware store), which would requires 0.625 tsp of bleach for 80 ppm (there are 128 ounces in a gallon). Free chloride is neutralized by light, so it is best to make a fresh solution for each cheesemaking session.


• A really good source of cheesemaking information is the University of Guelph's Cheese Page. Apparently Prof. Goddik uses this like and instead of a textbook when teaching cheesemaking classes in the university.
  
  Other reference books mentioned were G.H. Wilster's Practical Cheesemaking (out of print), Cheese Problems Solved by P. McSweeny, Cheesemaking Practice by J.E. Scott, and Fundamentals of Cheese Science by Patrick F. Fox.


• Tomme is a generic term for a style of cheese made by French farmers who did not want to make cheese 7 days a week. They would collect the milk from the weekend and make big batch of cheese on Monday and call it tomme.


• Cows fed on silage or feed that has fungus spores can give milk infected with the same spores. However, rather than the spores making it through the digestive track and making their way through the udder, as one might think, they are actually sucked in from the environment into the milking apparatus which has a constant vacuum, especially when detaching the apparatus from the udder.


• B. Linens, used in washed rind cheese, need oxygen and salt to survive, which is why they are sprayed on the surface of the cheese rather than added to the cheesemilk. Washing the rind with a 10% salt solution encourages the B. Linens, but discourages other molds and bacteria. B. Linens also require a low acid environment and so yeasts (Kluyveromyces lactis and Candida Utilis) and Geotrichum Candidum are used to neutralize the acidic environment of cheese so B. Linens can grow.


• Recommendations for the home cheesemaker who is using freeze dried cultures and molds from packets that are meant to be opened and used once by commercial cheesemakers: Re-wrap the packet tightly and re-cool as quickly as possible. Also, do not put the spoon you are measuring with into the freeze dried packet, instead tap out the powder onto the spoon. Otherwise you may contaminate the contents for many uses to come.


• I asked if there were any signs to look for in a homemade cheese that would indicate that the cheese might contain pathogens. The answer was a definite no, it is impossible to tell from simple examination. I took away from that it is best to use good sanitation and good quality milk to reduce the chances of pathogens growing in your cheese.


• Cheese salt used commercially is very fine, like a powder, not course course like kosher salt. Lisbeth Goddik told me in her opinion there is no need to use cheese salt unless you are dry salting large loaves of cheddar, where the even distribution of salt is important. She uses pickling salt in her pilot plant since it does not contain iodine, which is important.
  
  If you really wanted to approximate cheese salt, you could put pickling salt in a food processor and run on high for a minute. I have done this in the past to make "popcorn salt" which dissolves very quickly due to its small crystal size.
  


• Mixing raw milk with homogenized milk will cause rancidity almost immediately. In raw milk, the fat globules are encased in a membrane that keeps the fat separated from the water in the milk. On this membrane are lipase enzymes, which break apart fat molecules. Homogenized milk has had its fat globules broken into small droplets stripped of the external membrane. When raw and homogenized milk are mixed, the lipase in the raw milk very quickly attacks the unprotected droplets of fat in the homogenized milk.
  


• I brought one of my first homemade cheeses to class, a gouda. The cheese did not taste very good, at least to me. I characterized the flavor a rancid. It was quickly determined that he flavor came from the lipase I had added (which I had done to hopefully create a sharper flavor in the cheese). Dr. Goddik described the flavor as not necessarily bad, but not in balance with the other flavors in the cheese. The lipase I used was labeled as "sharp" and suitable for Parmesan styled cheese. When tasting it again I realized what I had called the rancid flavor could be described as the sharp flavor of Parmesan in an overpowering amount. I was very pleased that the cause of this failure had been determined.