As the wheel turns - Cheese making as a hobby

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    I have to be honest, at no time did I ever think I would want to make cheese.   My first effort, done more as an experiment than anything else, turned out very well.  So well in fact, that I wondered what else I could make.   I wanted to keep it simple.

My first Cheese, misshapen and all

    Keeping it simple means different things to different people of course.   I was hooked when I started to look up exactly what rennet was.  Which brings up the whole question of what the hell primitive man was thinking when they decided to put the milk back into the intestines of a dead animal or what lead to that discovery...and moving on.

    The earliest cheeses are probably similar to the Farmer's cheese that I made earlier (see link above) and that got me looking at other cheeses.  Paneer Cheese is from India and seems to use the same ingredients as my Farmer's Cheese with the only difference being lemon juice instead of a white vinegar.  Some recipes I came across even called for Buttermilk or even yogurt to be used in addition to the whole Cow milk that I was using.  

    While the basic cheese recipe itself was simple, the flavor would be changed if I used yogurt or buttermilk.  I was curious to know how.  If I was going to use buttermilk, then I might as well try to make Fromage Blanc as well. 

    I knew deep down that I had had Paneer Cheese sometime in my life, as I've had my fair share of Indian food after all.  However I could not remember actually having the cheese by itself.   

   

    So using an insta pot that we picked up yet had never really used I thought I would try Instant Pot Paneer Indian Soft Cheese.   Right off the bat I had my doubts about this one.   There were only two ingredients.  A quart of Half and Half and 1/4 cup white vinegar.   Both of which I just happened to have, although if I'm being honest, I've no clue where the Half and Half came from.  

    Well lets follow the instructions and see what happens.   I cooked it for the desired length of time...and released the pressure.   I could smell the vinegar...and something else.   This is not a good sign.   

    When I popped open the lid, after letting it sit for 10 minutes, frankly it didn't look like the curds and whey that I was expecting.   However the recipe did state that the the paneer should not be crumbly.   OK...I have a white mass floating in pea green whey.  

 

We sure about this boss?

    But I drained off the whey and was surprised by how much of the curds stayed together.   I was a bit disappointed however that the bottom of my insta pot was now a pain in the butt to clean.  Nothing got scorched, but the half and half did burn a little against the bottom of the pot.   Sadly I can't control my temperature setting as well as I would like.  

    I wondered if I should try and wash off the ball to get rid of any more vinegar but the recipe didn't call for it.  I was half tempted to add some honey for flavoring but thought if I was going to try it, lets do it right.

    Finally I put a heavy weight over the cheese to help drain the whey and help form the block.   I didn't know it at the time but my wife does have kitchen weights I could of used instead of my improvised cheese press consisting of two heavy cans placed into a pot. It seems simple enough to make your own cheese press together based on what I've seen.  

    The only thing I had to do now was taste it.   I figured that even if I didn't like it, I had learned something from this adventure.   Because that's what life is, an adventure. 

    In the end I can honestly say that it was a bland, lifeless cheese.   Adding honey or another flavor to it would have made it work I think.  Of course, like I mentioned before, it's a flavor I don't know really well.

     To my surprise however it turned out better than I expected despite its flavor.  Of course it's also designed that way.   Paneer is added to a variety of Indian dishes and can even be used as a meat substitute.  In some ways, this cheese is one of the foundations of Indian cooking.

    It occurred to me that I was well into the rabbit hole now.  As luck would have it, a relative of ours gave us an older dorm type refrigerator that would not only hold a variety of my beers (I was into craft brewing long before it became popular) but could also serve as my "cheese cave" when I got to that point of actually wanting to do some aged cheeses.  For now...it will hold my beer and wine nicely. 

    Everything listed here didn't need any special chemicals or starters and were all basically the same recipe with a little variation.  As someone that's interested in history and food, it was a way for me to connect to the people of 1000 or more years ago.  I wasn't walking exactly in their footsteps, but I was walking along the same trail, seeing how they used what they had on hand to make cheese.

    Of course, back then they didn't have to pay an average retail price of  $2.79 for a gallon of milk.  They were able to run out back, milk the goat or cow or sheep and what they didn't drink they could make into cheese.    

    Which makes me think that it may not be a bad idea to get a goat or two anyway.  At least then I wouldn't be using up all the milk.  Plus, if I buy it from the store, I'm looking at about 3 bucks more for a half gallon.   Goats milk just won't cut it without the goats.

    Cheese made sense to make in the ancient world, where something that provided a source of high protein, richer in vitamins and minerals and lasted for days to months as compared to milk.  Today, we simply don't need cheese in that matter.   We simply enjoy the flavor.

    Which got me thinking that somewhere nearby, I should be able to buy milk directly from the farmer and even though it may be unpasteurized...might be useful for what I was hoping to do.  Then there was the whole rennet thing.  

    My goal is to get to a point where I would feel comfortable making Columela's cheese, named after an ancient Roman writer and farmer that wrote about making cheese with the sap of a fig tree being used as the Rennet.   I don't have fig trees which is a shame because making a fig rennet appears to be rather simple.  Making my own Rennet would prove to be interesting indeed.

    Then would come another interesting test, and something that I was hoping to accomplish by the end of summer.   I want to make Caseus Fumosos Velabrensis.  Latin for Smoked Velabran Cheese.   The Velabran being an ancient market in the city of Rome itself.  I wanted to make this cheese in particular for two reasons.  One, I have a love of history...and making something that would have been eaten 2000 + years ago appeals to me.  The second reason was due to the "complexity" of it.  

    It's still a simple cheese but requires a smoker and apple wood chips.  It requires a salt brine and precise timing.  Overall...I thought it would be a good cheese for me to graduate from one stage of cheese making into another.

     We will get there...it's all in the (cheese) wheel.