Cheese Please!

Everyone here loves bocconcini. We eat it on paninis, with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar, or straight out of the brine. The problem is that you pay anywhere from about $5 – 7 for about 180 grams of the stuff and often it is just okay quality. I have seen cheese made on TV plenty of times, so I thought I would give it a go myself.

I did a bit of research and found lots of recipes and lots of complexity. The biggest problem has been finding ingredients or substitutes locally (Metro Vancouver); I do not keep goats in my backyard.

I did bump into David B. Fankhauser, Ph.D on the web and he seems to be the authority on making cheese at home. Some of his recipes are included with one of the key ingredients, Rennet, from Redco Foods, Inc. under the brand name Junket. His material is pretty thorough, but it leaves a bunch of questions for you to solve yourself. I did find a “foolproof” recipe here, but it calls for using citric acid to make your cheese. I want bocconcini, not a pizza blanket, so I moved on.

As I said, no goats or other milkable animals at my house or in my neighbourhood. That means a trip to the local supermarket for the basic ingredients. The main item I was struggling to find was Rennet. There are places on the web to get it like Danlac in Airdrie, Alberta or Glengarry Cheesemaking in Lancaster, Ontario. Shipping is huge at these places relative to a tiny order for Rennet, but I found that Bosa Foods sells the tablets ($2.99 for a box of 8). This was good as Dr. Fankhauser recommends these. I am sure there must be others places around town. I will have to keep my eyes open for something closer.

The next item was plain old milk. Pasteurized is probably best for a fresh mozzarella, but most of the milk I can easily and inexpensively find is homogenized also. I guess technically I need water buffalo milk to do this properly, but I have no clue where I will find that and I did want to keep this cheap.

Most recipes are from the USA and call for whole milk. As close as I can tell this is the same as homo (3.5% butter fat) here in BC. The nearest milk was Island Farms Homo, so I grabbed a 4 litre jug ($4.99 at Langley Farmers Market). Most of the recipes call for quantities in US gallons, which is just about 4 litres.

I thought I was ready to go, but as I read a little deeper into Dr. F’s material, I realized I needed a starter. Cultured buttermilk will do as a starter, so I picked up small container of Lucerne 1.5% buttermilk ($1.29 at Safeway). The name did not say “cultured”, but a quick look at the ingredients said it contained bacterial culture. Personally I have never seen the stuff that comes directly from making butter, so perhaps there is little chance of confusion here. Dr. F also said that you may need to use calcium chloride to enrich the store bought milk, but I thought I would take a chance without this.

I will not get into all the gory step-by-step details here as you can read them at Dr. F’s site, but I thought I would let you know what did or did not work. The beginning is pretty straight forward; warm the milk, add the starter, and wait. You are not supposed to scald the milk and you definitely need to keep the burner lower than you might expect. A little patience is a good thing here. I used a digital wireless thermometer I bought for the barbeque. It worked great for this.

I waited two hours, which was the minimum time before I checked for a “clean break”. Something had definitely happened with the milk, but there was no clean break, so I waited another hour. By the three hour mark it looked as though there might be a clean break, but I could not be sure, so I waited another hour. After four hours it looked like the conditions were right.

One thing I noticed right away was that my curd did not seem as firm as Dr. F’s curd. I thought maybe the calcium chloride might have made a difference, but I also started to think I may have been keeping the milk too warm. The instructions say to keep it warm, but provide no specific temperature. There is also information that says to keep it a room temperature, but I could not say I find room temperature warm. I decided to us my oven. I warmed it to 100F then turned it off and put the mixture in. The temperature after four hours was still at 89F. Seems warm, but also certainly hotter than room temperature.

I should mention that I am fully metric where ever practical. Dr. F’s instructions are in mostly in imperial and metric, but I keep my thermometer on imperial as those are the numbers I remember when I am cooking meat.

Next I was suppose to mix it and let it sit a bit, so the whey and the curds could separate. At first it did not seem to be happening, but eventually the curds fell to the bottom and the whey sat on the top making it easy to pour off and save for making ricotta.

I was not super excited about my curds at this point. They seemed pretty weak, but I left the pot overnight for “acidification”. About 12 hours later I took a look at the batch and nothing had happened to make the curds any better than they were before. In fact, they seemed worse, almost ricotta texture. I followed some of the next recipe steps, but it did not take me long to give up and just drain it; I was left with about 400g of ricotta like stuff. I think we will have lasagne next week.

I am guessing that my fundamental problem was that I was not getting good curds in the first place. The milk was relatively fresh; at least right from the store. The same was true for the buttermilk, which I am assuming was good enough as a starter. More rennet might have helped, but I did a little research (There is another good website with cheese making info called cheeseforum.org) and found that chlorine will inhibit the enzyme from doing its work. I used tap water, so no shortage of chlorine in there as we are on Metro Vancouver water.

There is also the calcium problem I mentioned earlier. Store bought milk is pasteurized and that processes causes a loss of calcium. You can restore the calcium with calcium chloride, but this is another strange ingredient to source. You should use food grade calcium chloride. It is used to keep pickles firm among other things, but you are not likely to find it in a regular grocery store. Apparently it is used when making beer, so a brewer’s supply house might have it. Non-food grade calcium chloride is used for lots of other things, but it is probably not best to use it to make cheese.

I managed to find the right stuff at D.C. Duby where you can order it online ($6.25 + shipping), but I also found it at Famous Foods on Kingsway in Vancouver ($1.29 + gas). I want to give the cheese making thing another shot tomorrow, so I made a quick trip to Famous Foods; open till 9pm. As it turns out, it is a very cool place. Many hard to find ingredients. They even have the rennet. Nothing like one stop shopping.

So, fingers crossed. No chlorine and a bit of calcium. Let’s hope that does the trick.