Making Chèvre

Today was my last attempt with making cheese with my fresh goat's milk.  I may experiment later in the year with frozen milk.  I've read lots of advice from different internet sites on using frozen milk.  They directly conflict each other on several points.  "Don't use frozen milk, it won't work.  Frozen milk works just fine for cheese making.  You can make cheese with frozen milk if you thaw it slowly. You can make cheese with frozen milk if you thaw it quickly. etc."  My book says to only use milk less than 48 hours old.  So, who knows?

Anyway, I chose chèvre for today's cheese. It is a french-style soft cheese.

Once again, I started out with fresh whole milk in the vat, five quarts this time, and warmed it to 80 degrees.  I sprinkled DVI Chèvre Culture over the warmed milk and stirred.  Then I added diluted rennet and stirred again.  Then, as per the instructions, I put the lid on and left it undisturbed for eight hours.

It was pretty quick and simple.

This is what it looked like after eight hours.  I didn't dare even lift the lid or jostle it during that time period for fear of messing something up.  So, I was excited to see if it had done anything, and it had!  I was happy to see that it was a large solid mass.  I tilted the pan for the picture to show how it pulls away from the edge en masse.  There was a film of whey over the top.

Then I poured it into a cheesecloth lined colander to let it drain.  After a large portion of whey had drained out...

I pulled up the edges of the cheesecloth and tied them so that I could hang it to drain more.  My banana hanger worked pretty good for this part.  I had to empty the blue bowl several times.

After about six hours of draining, the cheese had taken on the contours of the cheesecloth.  It looked sort of like a pumpkin.  I divided it into containers and put it in the refrigerator.  I'll do an internet search for a good recipe to season it.

I was very happy with how it turned out.  Hopefully, it will taste as good as it looks.

The Year of the Cheese

Finally, after raising goats for, what? five years now, I had enough milk to experiment with cheese making.  My plan was to milk three goats, with Daughter-in-law's help.  It turned out that we got so much milk from just two that I really didn't need the third, so we just let her feed her triplets and left her alone.  My milking is limited to how much storage space I have.  I filled up my allotted space in the chest freezer, gave several quarts to Nephew (who has returned to Texas, God's country, but is living at his own place now), and two dozen quarts to Daughter-in-law's parents.

We decided to experiment with cheese making using the milk from the last couple of weeks of milking.  My cheese making book said to use fresh milk, no more than 48 hours old.  So we had to plan ahead, saving a couple of days worth of milk for each project.  We started with not-really-cheese-but-yogurt.  It looked like a very simple process in my cheese book.

I got my cheese making stuff laid out and ready to go.  Cultures, measuring things, book...

cheese vat (which is really just a large double boiler), and thermometer.

We started with two quarts of fresh milk.

Put it in the vat and heated the milk to 115 degrees.  We used some store bought greek yogurt as a starter culture, which is stirred into the warmed milk.

Then the yogurt-to-be must be incubated for 6-12 hours, at a temperature of 100 degrees.  We decided to keep it warm in a crock pot, which seemed like a great idea at the time, but turned out to be not such a great idea.  I had to check it constantly and adjust the temperature...low, off, high, keep warm...none of the setting would keep a constant temperature.  We read later that putting it in the oven works well for some people.  I'll try that the next time.

We thought it was a big fail because it looked so milky even after ten hours of incubating.  But, after being refrigerated, it did set up and we were happy to find that we actually were marginally successful at making the yogurt.  Daughter-in-law let hers strain in cheesecloth, which gave it a thicker consistency.

Next up was an attempt at mozzarella.  We started with one gallon of fresh milk, added dissolved citric acid to it and then heated to 88 degrees.  Then we added diluted rennet and let it sit for fifteen minutes to coagulate.

When it's coagulated enough, the test is dipping a finger in to see of the curds break cleanly.  Daughter-in-law did the honors and it did, indeed, break cleanly.

Beginning to cut the curds carefully.  This is nerve wracking.

It's cut into squares and then an attempt to cut them underneath the surface.

This is the best we could do.  We were pretty pleased with ourselves to see our little squares of curds floating in the whey.

Our satisfaction was short lived because the curds, which are supposed to stay in nice little square shapes, quickly became a big sticky glob as we followed the instructions to slowly bring the temperature to 108 degrees and hold for 35 minutes.  We were supposed to stir gently to keep the curds from matting.  I'd say it's too late for that.

We strained the cheese in a colander and then "heat treated" it.  We were supposed to be able to "work" the curds with our spoon, mixing them with a little salt.  But it was pretty difficult to "work" a  little unwieldy lump of spongy mozzarella.

Oh well.  It wasn't a complete fail.  A little on the dry side, but we did end up with something mozzarella-like, bordering on parmesan.  And it tasted OK.

On to the ricotta.  Super easy. 

Again, we started with one gallon of fresh milk.  We heated the milk in our cheese vat to 185 degrees, removed it from the heat and added organic apple cider while stirring.  The tiny curds formed quickly.

Poured into a colander lined with cheese cloth and let it drain for 30 minutes.

Voila!  Lovely ricotta.

I see lasagna in my future.

What surprised me the most about this cheese making experience is that it takes so much milk to make so little cheese.  A gallon of milk yielded just two little pats, maybe a cup each, of mozzarella and it took a gallon of milk to make about two cups of ricotta.  I felt so wasteful pouring all of that whey down the drain.  There are things one can make with whey, but it requires fresh whey, so you have to be prepared to start your next project immediately after you've poured off your whey.  That's a pretty big time commitment that we weren't ready to make.