Blessed are the cheesemakers! Or: Can I age an acid-set cheese, if I really try?

Cafe Society
1

My family is away visiting other family, leaving me home alone. I’ll survive, but we forgot to cancel the milk, so the milkman delivered six pints of semi-skimmed this morning, on top of two and a half pints that were already in the fridge. There’s no way I’ll drink or use this much in any conventional way.

I’ve made acid-set cheese before - in the form of Paneer - and then, as now, I wondered if it is at all possible, rather than consuming it fresh and fairly bland, to age it like a French soft cheese, or even like a hard cheese such as cheddar.

I suppose I could just go and buy some rennet and a starter culture, but I just don’t fancy getting all tooled up for this, and besides, it sounds like an interesting experiment, so… what’s wrong with this idea?:

Milk>heat>lemon juice>curdle>strain>press=Paneer.

Break up and rinse (maybe in a weak bicarb solution, to neutralise some of the acid.

Add some salt

Inoculate with a starter culture, that is, a small amount of shop-bought (real) cheddar cheese, mashed into a paste and mixed in (the bacteria in the cheddar must still be alive, right?)

Press again, into a shaped mould

(Maybe) inoculate the rind with a white mould culture taken from a piece of Camembert or Brie (I know that’s alive, as it grows over the edges of the foil-paper wrapper.

Store it in some kind of airy, but protected container (a clean wooden box faced with gauze, perhaps) in a cool place such as my unheated garage

What could possibly go wrong? Well, yeah, it could just rot.

Please feel free to pick apart my plan…

2

Nobody? I thought we had a few cheesemakers here. I guess I might just have to try it and see what happens.

3

You seriously mind the (relatively few, probably) cheesemakers on this board taking more than eight hours to respond? You must really want that cheese bad!

4

I have a friend who attempted to age acid-set cheese. He got extremely sick. It’d be impossible to conclusively pin that on the cheese (and he didn’t use the method you propose) but it was enough to end his experiences. I do recall learning a method that involved wax, but I don’t remember the details.

For a better acid-set cheese experience, you can give it some time wrapped in vinegar soaked cloth.

5

Maybe I was a bit hasty, but it was about to fall off the first page - we’re allowed one free bump, I think…

6

I am away from a real computer for the next day or so, but when I get back I will ask my cheese club friends about your question.

7

In the meantime, if you have freezer space, you can freeze the milk to buy yourself some time. (If that would interfere with the cheesemaking, then use the frozen milk to drink and make cheese of the new milk that will be coming soon.)

8

Well, I started in earnest, but it didn’t go completely to plan. I can’t seem to press the curds dry enough.

I don’t know if this is because:

I need better equipment (I used a tied cloth bag under weighted plates, then wrapped the curds in a smaller cloth and pressed them in a potato ricer pulled very tight with a Spanish windlass)
or
I didn’t give it long enough (6 hours of pressing)
or
Maybe there’s something about acid-set curds that makes them less willing to give up their moisture content.

So I have Paneer again. Oh well - it’s still not a failure.

9

Update…

I put the curds I managed to press the driest on a plastic griddle and covered it with a bowl. This has now been on the shelf in my fridge for 5 days and it’s changed from pure white to pale buttery yellow. It smells faintly like a French soft cheese.

I’m not sure I’ll be brave enough to eat this - because although this was inoculated with a culture taken from a piece of cheddar, I still can’t be sure what it is I’m culturing here - it might be dominated by something pathogenic, for all I know.

I’m going to continue monitoring it for a week, or two, or until something goes wrong with it.

10

For future reference, when you want to play with your food again, the cheddar that you have may not actually have much in the way of actual live culture left in it - the microbes can senesce [die off] over time as their food source goes away. What you probably should do is go to a web page like that of the new england cheesemaking company and buy a packet of the actual inoculate to add to the milk. There is also an issue if you want to use pasteurized milk with rennet, it needs a chemical added to break down the effect of the heat on the milk [but making paneer it doesn’t]

11

I did wonder about this, but I figured that in a young cheddar, they might still be hanging on, or at least might only be dormant or in spore or something.
I mashed the piece of cheddar in milk and left it at room temperature overnight, the day before I made the curds, and this resulting mixture did seem slightly yoghurty and alive in the morning, although this is also the thing that concerns me most, as this could be the route through which some undersirable culture could have been introduced.

Sure, but that’s the proper way to do it, and it’s something I intend to try later, but this was an experiment to purposely (try to) do things without any of the proper kit.

12

Final update on this experiment, because I finished it today:

The curds started turning a pale orange colour and exuding a clear yellow-green liquid. The smell was strong, like overripe Camembert. I cut the thing in half and the curds inside where still pale whitish yellow.

No way I’d have tried eating this - I’m sure there was quite a lot going on there, microbially, but could just be a seething heap of food poisoning bacteria getting ready to pounce. I dumped it in the food waste recycling bin. Took an hour to air out the kitchen.

This has still been a worthwhile experiment for me, even though it produced no cheese to speak of - just because there doesn’t seem to be much documentation out there on what happens if you try it all the wrong way. I’m going to write this up and publish it on the web, because I’ve found it quite an interesting failure.

13

wonderful =)

playing with food is great fun =)