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

Not quite curdy enough yet

The milk didn't seem to coagulate as we expected, it's been standing for around 3 hours, twice as long as it should have done. It does seem to be changing slowly, I think there may have been something wrong with the starter mixture. Mrs Cheese has just dipped a clean finger in and seems happy, so it look like we are moving on to the next step.

A few more hours

We will be making our first cheese today, the starter needs a few more hours until it is ready. We should leave it until it smells "sharp and clean" but I don't know how that smell differs from slightly off milk. Sadly we have had to dump the fermentation barrel as even after being sterilised 4 times, it smells like 2 year old beer and I don't want yeasty tasting cheese. Photos will be up in a few hours of the first cheese, so check back then!

Cheese Starter

The Starter solution has been made up, this is a mixture of the freeze dried starter culture and milk.

Step 1: Heat the milk to 90 degrees C and hold for ten minutes (or have Mrs Cheese do it).

Step 2: Rapidly cool the milk to 20 degrees and whisk in the culture, seal in a container and incubate for 24 hours at around 22 degrees. The culture will be ready tomorrow at around 1:30 and then we will make our first cheese 'Golden Udder'.

The Milk

Due to an unexpectedly long two and a half hour lunch and a bottle of wine each myself and Mrs Cheese have been unable to make the cheese starter today. I did manage to buy the milk - 3 litres of pasteurised Jersey milk from pure bred herds of Jersey cows. The starter will be made tomorrow which should mean the first of the cheese can be produced on Sunday.

It's Cheese Day!

The Cheese kit has arrived, pictured above you can see the cheesemat, cheesecloth, curd skimmer, thermometer, cheese culture, rennet, a variety of cheese moulds, a wooden cheese presentation block and the instruction book. This kit is for soft cheeses which have a short maturing time of a few days if the first few go well I will be ordering the cheese press to make semi soft and hard cheeses too. the first cheese is going to be cow milk cheese. For the first batch I need 3 litres of milk - this will make up the cheese starter liquid and the cheese. So first to buy the milk and sterilise the equipment, then make up the cheese starter which must be left to incubate for 24 hours. Myself and Mrs Cheese are trying to think of a name for our first cheese but we are strugling a bit.

A happier day in Cheeseland

Ascott have called me back and have 'found' my order, I have been told it will be sent out first class today and will be with me tomorrow. Would have been nice if they had thrown ina free goat for my inconveneince but nevermind. Let's hope it will be cheese day tomorrow!

A sad day in Cheeseland

Despite placing my order a week ago my cheesekit has still not arrived, I'm quite disappointed because I am quite eager to start my first cheese. I have emailed Ascott to see what has happened to my order. I'm quite pleased to see some regular visits from across the UK and various other countries across the world- welcome to you all - I hope I can provide you some actual cheesemaking very soon.

Update 14:00 21/08/09

After no reply to my mail i have phoned them and essentially they don't know where my order is. Apparently they will phone me back when they have found it. I hope it's soon and i expect free next delivery for this as it's pretty poor customer service.

Cheese Labelling

I need to label my cheeses, mainly so I know what they are when I have quite a few maturing at one time. The kind of information I want to record is the name of the cheese, the milk type (goat/cow/pastuerised/raw etc), other ingredients (seasonings or extra moulds) and a few other things about how it is finished off and of course the date it was born so I know how long it has matured. Label writers seem quite pricey so I hit on the idea of using one of those free business card offers, you get 250 cards and only pay p&p. So i spent a little time designing one which you can see below. These cards can be fastened to the maturing cheeses and included with the finished cheese taped to its wrapper or included in the box or whatever.


A few other details are included - Cheese No - just a unique incremental number for each cheese, that way i'll know how many cheeses i've made. Wrap is whatever the cheese may be wrapped in - vine leaves or anything like that. The wash is what the finished cheese is washed in - brine, cider etc and maturation indicates how many months it should be left for.

Maturing Barrel

The maturing barrell, the finished wrapped cheeses will be placed in this beer fermenting barrel. This has a very strong tight seal that will stop it absorbing any moisture and taste from the cupboard and hopefully stop my flat smelling like a chesemongers.

Maturing Cupboards

Left: This is the cupboard where the cheese will be matured, here you can see the maturing barrel and the thermometer haninging from the ceiling.

The maturing cupboard is ready

I have prepared the cupboard in which the cheeses will mature to their full delicious cheesy ripeness, a space has been cleared and the fermenting bin has been sterilised. I have also hung a wee thermometer to keep an eye on the temperature. Pictures will follow later :)

Cheese Supplies

The cheese kit can be seen here (soft cheese kit) and is quite cheap compared to other places. http://www.ascott-dairy.co.uk/acatalog/Cheeseamking_Kits.html

If all works out well with the soft cheeses i will be buying the hard cheese upgrade kit and knocking out some cheddar style cheese.

First Preparations

A soft cheese kit has been ordered which should let me make all the cows, sheep and goats soft cheeses i can imagine. The kit will here in a few days, in the mean time i will be cleaning out the cheese maturing cupboard and the giant fermenting barrell previously used for beer.