Milk (51 page)

I never use any special equipment or ingredients from cheesemaking-supply companies. These expenses may make sense if you’re working on a professional scale with dozens of
gallons of milk at a time. But for one or two pounds (roughly two to four cups) of cheese, anybody can get equally good results with pretty ordinary kitchen resources and a little planning. (If you decide to explore fresh cheeses more zealously, see the
Note on Shopping Sources
.)

The only necessary ingredients are milk or a milk-cream mixture, a source of live lactic-acid bacteria to inoculate and culture the milk, and in three of the following five cheese recipes, an enzyme to help set up the curd.

Very fresh milk from a small dairy is always preferable, but supermarket milk will do. As for the inoculant, I use plain cultured buttermilk. You may need to try a few supermarkets before finding a brand with active cultures and without added salt or gums. My enzyme source is plain unflavored Junket brand
rennet tablets, and here some people will have easier hunting than others. Some supermarket chains and specialty food shops still carry this once-common ingredient. If you strike out, I suggest asking the maker of Junket about local sources (Redco Foods, Inc., P.O. Box 879, Windsor, CT. 06095; or e-mail
[email protected]
). Vegetarians and kosher cooks please note: This rennet is an animal product. Luckily you have an excellent alternative in the rennetless cheese on
this page
.

The steps you will be going through in most cases are putting the milk in a nonreactive saucepan or other container, warming it to a suitable inoculation temperature (generally between about 85° and 100°F; I recommend an instant-reading thermometer), letting it incubate for a prescribed period of usually between 8 and 24 hours at (preferably warm) room temperature, and draining the whey from the curd. This last part of the procedure is the only one requiring much advance organization. For it you will need a colander or strainer set over a pan or bowl and lined with
tight-woven
cheesecloth—not the loose, flimsy supermarket article—or another good-sized piece of clean cotton cloth such as a large handkerchief or remnant of old bedsheet. The cloth must be large enough to line the colander with some overhang and to tie up into a bag for the final stage: hanging up to finish draining for an unpredictable interval of (usually) several hours. You will need something to hang it on, like the kitchen faucet (if you won’t be using it for a while) or a sturdy wooden spoon placed over a pail deep enough for the bag of curd not to touch
the bottom. Remember that the curd will be in a messy, sloshy state when you actually start transferring it between the first vessel and the colander or getting the cloth bag hung up. You’ll thank yourself later if you can get as prepared as possible beforehand.

The most complex recipe in this chapter, “
Fresh White Cheese with Cultures and Rennet,” involves an additional stage of cutting the incubated curd into cubes and gradually heating it to a temperature high enough to firm it up by expelling whey more efficiently. The extra equipment you will need is described in the recipe. For the last stage of the two cream-cheese recipes, a weight of several pounds (another whey-expelling measure) is helpful.

H
ere is cheese for the scientifically challenged. In somewhat telescoped form, it illustrates the stages of curd formation and draining explained above. I originally came across it in several American-published Russian cookbooks as a resourceful substitute for
tvorog, the beloved Russian pot or farmer cheese. Though it’s a little tougher than fresh cheese made by more orthodox methods, the flavor is good.

The reason this is easier to make than other fresh cheeses is that you have a head start on the task of precipitating the casein from the whey. It’s already been incompletely precipitated by the lactic-acid bacteria added to the milk at the manufacturing plant to make cultured buttermilk. Just heating it speeds up the process enough for better curd formation. Other fresh cheeses require you to add the bacteria yourself, and rest on a much more cautious application of heat that leaves the curd more tender and delicate. Still, the general principle is the same.

YIELD:
About 1 cup cheese and 3 cups sour whey per starting quart of buttermilk. (See
Uses of Whey
.)

Go buy a cardboard carton—two, if you’re game—of cultured buttermilk. It should be made without salt or gummy stabilizers, and preferably should have
a milkfat content of at least 1.5 percent. Place the unopened carton(s) in a deep pan such as a stockpot or asparagus steamer and add enough cold water to come close to the top of the cartons. Bring the water to a full boil over high heat. Remove the pot from the heat and let the whole thing cool to room temperature.

Read the directions on
this page
for preparing a cloth-lined colander set over a saucepan or other vessel, tying the cloth into a bag, and hanging it up to drain. Open the carton(s) and dump the contents into the colander, then proceed with the tying-up and draining stages. When the whey stops dripping, turn out the drained curd into a bowl and briefly work it with a wooden spoon. Work in a pinch or two of salt and a dash of cream, if desired. Store in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for three to four days, and use in any way you would use commercial cottage or pot cheese.

T
his version of fresh cheese is somewhat more complicated than the preceding one but has no real hurdles as long as the inoculated milk doesn’t get bumped or jounced while incubating. The recipe calls for skim milk not because whole milk won’t work but in order to eliminate one variable during a first effort. Later you can try the whole-milk version (
this page
). But this cheese actually is one thing that I prefer made with skim milk.

To repeat my inevitable mantra, the flavor will be best if you look for very fresh milk, without added milk solids, from a small dairy that does batch pasteurizing. But freshness really is more crucial with the second essential ingredient: a mixture of several different mesophilic starter bacteria. As explained earlier, my preferred
source of these organisms is simply a little cultured buttermilk of at least 1.5 percent milkfat content. If it has been sitting around long enough in the store or your refrigerator to lose a lot of the original bacterial activity, the milk either will take longer to curdle or may scarcely curdle at all. Read labels and don’t buy anything that lacks the magic words “live cultures,” or that contains gums and salt. If you can find cultured buttermilk at a local farmers’ market, snap it up at once and use it that day or the next.

The recipe can be halved if a gallon of milk sounds intimidating, but don’t try to cut it beyond that.

YIELD:
About 4-plus cups cheese and 11 to 12 cups slightly soured whey per starting gallon of milk. (Expect wide variation. See
Uses of Whey
.)

Read the directions on
this page
for preparing a cloth-lined colander set over a saucepan or other vessel, tying the cloth into a bag, and hanging it up to drain. Have the kitchen sink clear, to be used as a water bath.

Pour the milk into a 6-quart pot. Run hot water into the sink to a depth of several inches, set the pot in it, and test the temperature of the milk. Stir it gently, occasionally rechecking the temperature, until it reaches about 85° to 90°F. If you have to add more hot water or resort to heating some in a kettle, be sure not to splash it into the milk. And it’s better to warm the milk cautiously than find that you’ve suddenly gotten it much hotter than you meant to.

Remove the pot of milk from the sink, and set it in a warmish spot (things will proceed faster if the room is at 75° to 80°F) where it will not be disturbed for the next day. Shake up the carton of buttermilk in case the thicker part has settled; stir in ½ cup. Loosely cover the pot with a cloth, and go away and leave it. The inoculated milk
must not be jostled,
and the room temperature shouldn’t fluctuate wildly.

After about 12 hours, take a look at the milk, without moving or jiggling the pot, to see whether it has started to set in a curd. Most likely it won’t be well set until 18 to 24 hours after inoculation. You will know it’s ready when, as you cautiously test the edge with a small spoon, you see a bit of soft but definite curd break from the mass like a very tender custard.

Set the colander, with cloth lining in place, over a bowl to catch the whey. Very gently ladle the contents of the milk pan into the colander, carefully pouring in the last bit of whey and scraping out any clinging curd. Let the whey drain for 1 to 2 hours. When the surface is less flooded, gather up the corners of the cloth and shift the weight around a little to encourage more draining. Tie the corners into a bag and hang it up to drain until the whey has stopped dripping. This will take anywhere from 4 to 8 hours. If you get discouraged, you can hasten things by putting the bag in a strainer over a bowl and weighting it with something like a heavy can set on a plate. When it gets to soft-cheese consistency, turn the curd out into a mixing bowl and work it smooth with a wooden spoon. Work in about ½ to ¾ teaspoon of salt (less for a half-sized batch). You can also add a very little cream if you like, but I prefer
it without. It will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for four to seven days.

Call it anything you like, from cottage cheese to fromage blanc to Schmierkäse; names for cheeses of this ilk are notoriously unsystematic and imprecise in every language. By all means mix it with any seasonings you like—green herbs, scallions, horseradish, blue cheese, chutney, minced celery or olives, pickled jalapeños, salmon caviar, or anything else that occurs to you—before serving it to guests in the form of a spread (it’s great on open-faced sandwiches). Or put the unadorned cheese on the table and eat it with apple butter or prune lekvar. The nineteenth-century cookbook author
Mary Lincoln reports that it “is delicious with warm gingerbread.”