Chief Cheesemonger is back

Hello Cheese Fans,

I've been extremely lazy and gave up on my cheesing after the first attempt. Expect more cheese antics this year - im armed with a new book on cheesemaking and am going to order soem more cheese supplies soon.

Cheese tips from the experts

I went to the Great British Cheese Festival in Cardiff yesterday and tasted a huge range of cheeses, some amazing, some awful. I discovered some new ingredient combinations to try out with my cheeses like spring onion and sun died tomatoes, spring onion with garlic, the cheddar with harissa was great. I had a chat with a cheesemaker at the Bath cheees stand about cheesemaking and he has given me some tips for next time. He recommended heating the milk to a temperature of around 63 degress rather than 90 and that the way my curd developed was not right, it should not be lots of small lumps of curd but a large solid block.

It also appears that the starter culture should have been placed in the freezer once opened and that it may no longer be so effective, we shall have to see. The next batch will be made up shortly.

Cheese updates

It's been a while since i produced a batch of cheese but a new batch of goats cheese is on the way. i've been doing some research and talking to some people to work out what went wrong last time and try to improve it this time. Should hopefully be making up the starter culture tomorrow.

Don't forget the British Cheese Festival takes place this saturday in Cardiff, hundreds of producers offering samples and lots of cheeses to buy. I'm going in the name of research you understand and certainly won't be repeating last year where i sampled one piece from every stand. Actually, yes i will. This time however, i will ride the mechanical bull at the start of the day, not at the end after the cheese and the beer tent

Goats Cheese

The new batch of starter culture will be made this evening for the Goats Cheese. Hopefully this starter will work better than the last batch.

The results are in

The cheeses have been tasted and overall the results were fairly good. In order of merit we have the Garlic and parsley cheese, the black pepper cheese and finally the plain cheese. Out of the five tasters, 80 % preferred the garlic variety with just one vote for the peppered cheese.

All the cheeses had a good firm texture and cut well, unfortunately the plain cheese (Golden Udder) had a slightly sour taste. I'm not really sure what could have caused this, maybe the temperature was slightly too high, I will look into it and post back. This sourness was not noticeable in the other cheeses, we will make up a new batch of starter culture and maybe try the next batch at a lower temperature.

The Tasters choice Award goes to Golden Garlic Udder

First set of cheeses

Here are the final cheeses, they have been turned 4 times over the last 24 hours and are ready to be stored in the fridge until we eat them. The official tasting ceremony is taking place tomorrow when we will see if we have created something beautiful or just pleasantly shaped blocks of mouldy salty milk. The cheeses are really quite small compared to the initial amount of curds, we finished with 415 g of cheese from 2.5 litres of milk.

The first three cheeses

All turned out well with the curds and whey, the first three cheeses have been produced and are standing for 24 hours to allow all the liquid whey to drain. In the picture above, left to right are Black Gold Udder (cow's milk with black pepper), Golden Udder (plain cow's milk) and Golden Garlic Udder (cow's milk with garlic and parsley). As soon as they are firm enough to hold we will be turning them. Below are a few pitures from the cheesemaking process.

Top to Bottom: Adding starter Culture to warmed milk, making the rennet solution, the finished curds and whey after 3 hours standing. The curd was scooped out into the moulds