I always believed making cheese to be very difficult, but the more I look into it the more I realise there are many different levels of complexity depending on the type of cheese; simple soft cheeses like brie and feta take no more than a few hours to make with simple ingredients in the cupboard while hard cheeses require different bacterial cultures and months or years of maturation in a cool place.
So on Monday I decided to make the simplest of soft cheeses - cottage cheese - using a recipe I found on Allotment.org.uk
It looked fairly straightforward. All cheese is made from coagulated or curdled lumps of milk, so all you need to do is add something that produces that curdling reaction. Some people use a starter - which is essentially a quantity of lactic acid bacteria you can culture yourself or buy in from a producer - but another way is to use something acidic like lemon juice or vinegar. So that's where I decided to start.
Semi-skimmed milk and lemon juice
I'm not going to go into the finer details, as allotment.org.uk details it very clearly, but basically I added lemon juice to hot semi-skimmed milk with a pinch of salt, let the curds separate and then drained it. I didn't use 2 pints of milk, only one, as I didn't want to waste milk if it didn't work and after seeing no curds at all I added a second tablespoon of lemon juice.
The result were - well - not fantastic I have to say. It certainly separated the curds and whey, but on a very small scale. There wasn't a great deal of 'cheese', perhaps enough for one sandwich, and it was quite lemony and of a yoghurt consistency. I added a few Herbs de Provence and had it for breakfast on homemade bread this morning. It was certainly nice and refreshing, but simply not enough from a whole pint of milk. After weighing there was only 1.5oz.
Whole milk and cider vinegar
I was surprised that the original recipe called for semi-skimmed milk and not whole milk, as people who have their own cows and goats and more likely to have whole milk lying around that needs processing, so I tried with whole milk to see if that made a difference. I also used cider vinegar this time (2 tbsp to match with the first experiment) instead of lemon to see if the taste was less intrusive.
Wow! That's more like it! Definitely cottage cheese!
After tasting and adjusting with a little more salt and some herbs, I had 3.5oz to eat. This is much better, but still not as much as I would like. So the question is, can I make something more from the left over whey that justifies making cottage cheese?
What to do with the whey?
Monday's experiment left me with over 3/4 pint of yellowy-green whey, which I left to sit in the fridge overnight while I thought about what I was going to do with it. A scan of the internet revealed an interesting recipe for ricotta. Ricotta is the made by boiling left over whey from the cheese-making process until the remaining milk proteins denature, clump together and come out of solution to form curds. Although it recommends leaving the whey at room temperature overnight, I had already refrigerated it so I decided to use it anyway.
Not enthused. It looked nothing like the pictures I'd seen of rolling clumps of curds, but I still strained it through cotton over a jug. Being impatient for results, I decided not to hang it overnight but gathered up the ends of the cotton when it seemed the liquid had all but gone and twisted it round gently to get a few more drops out. Then I opened the cotton up and had a look.
Now that looks a little promising. So I tasted it. OH MY GOD! Tasty, tangy ricotta - better than anything I've bought in the shops. I was dancing round the kitchen. It was only 2oz, but it was my own homemade 2oz. Woohoo!
Next up was the whey from this morning. I boiled it up, left it to cool and strained it through cotton. There was much less ricotta - around 1.5oz - and it had a much blander taste I presume because I used vinegar.
So, the skimmed milk and lemon juice yielded 1.5oz of cottage cheese and 2oz of ricotta, while the whole milk and vinegar yielded 3.5oz of cottage cheese and 1.5oz of ricotta. However, the experiment isn't over, because the method I used for making the ricotta changed. Leaving the whey overnight at room temperature could increase ricotta yields because the remaining milk sugars are converted to lactic acid, which decreases the pH and therefore protein solubility and increases yields. My lack of ricotta in the whole milk experiment could have been simply because it wasn't left overnight to convert all of its sugars.
Whole milk and lemon juice
So as a final test, I did the experiment once more, this time using whole milk and lemon juice. I wanted to see if I could get the yield of cottage cheese I wanted and the tanginess of the ricotta as well. When you have something tangy a little can go a long way.
So another pint of whole milk went on the stove, 2tbsp of lemon juice were added when it got hot and the results strained when cool.Straight away I could tell it wasn't giving me the same results that cider vinegar did. The lumps were small and diffuse, not large and clot-like, but the result was over 3oz of cottage cheese, which I mixed up with some plum jam to make a sweet sandwich topping.
I covered and left out the whey overnight on the bench, and boiled it up this morning. Unfortunately, it did quite poorly giving me only 0.5oz of ricotta which lacked tang as was quite bland. I've no idea then what caused the tanginess the first time unless the fact the milk was semi-skimmed had something to do with it.
Overall, I would make this again using whole milk and probably vinegar, but possibly only if I had my own cows or goats and was drowning in an almost inexhaustable supply of milk. For the amount of milk it uses for the yield, I don't think it's worth it.
What's next?
I'm going to have a break from cheese experiements until next week, when I will be attempting to make a reasonable quantity of soft cheese using a lactic acid starter. This I'm hoping will convert a whole pint of milk into yoghurt first and then into a decent amount of soft cheese when strained under mild pressure. Stay tuned.
