Adventures in Whey II: Not Just for Little Miss Muffet Anymore

This is part two of what I'm desperately hoping doesn't become a series.  I did actually attempt (and mostly succeed) in going from a gallon of milk to three cheeses in about a day.  Warning: do not attempt this without a LOT of time on your hands.














So, I finally get a day off and what do I do?  Make cheese.  Totally not my fault!  I was thinking about the earlier post I did on uses for whey and then I bought some ricotta salata at Whole Foods and it was overpriced and I started to think about how I could make some cheese...well, you get the picture.  As promised, here are the recipes I used and my comments on each step of the cheese-making journey.

You too can make cheese!

You will need: milk, citric acid, rennet, a thermometer, and a stew pot/dutch oven kind of thing

Tips: 

• regular old whole milk is fine
• citric acid is tougher to find than you'd think
• so is rennet

For those in Atlanta: I went to CVS for the milk, Rainbow Natural Foods for the Citric Acid, and Return to Eden (over on Cheshire Bridge) for the rennet.  For those not in Atlanta, Whole Foods is hit or miss, call ahead.  If you are desperate, buy online, or look up the ingredient you need and see if you can call a distributor to see if it is available in your town (this is what the stocker at my local Whole Foods told me at least).

Mozzarella:

I primarily used this instructables recipe which was very thorough.  I also had some help from a cheese video featuring Rahm Fama:

I started with a half gallon of kind of pricey, non-homogenized, organic milk.  It went nowhere.  Didn't curdle, didn't clabber, nothing.  I think I used too much citric acid and in general was just too nervous.  What did end up working was plain old pasteurized whole milk from the CVS down the street.  Who knew?

This cheese turned out pretty well but was a little liquid-y.  I'm not sure what went wrong, but I'm guessing it was either ultra-pasteurized rather than pasteurized, or I didn't use enough rennet, or more likely, when heating the curds up to make the mozzarella the curds absorbed too much of the salt water.  ::sigh::

Total cheese yield: about a pound
Total time spent: around 3 hours (not counting the half-gallon failure)

Ricotta:
So much faster!  So much easier!  I should just make this from now on!  You basically boil the whey left over from the mozzarella, let it cool down to about 140F and then strain it.  That's it.  I followed the Instructables recipe for this as well. The cheese was a little grainier than I'm used to with store-bought ricotta, but I might have let it strain too long?  Or maybe there was something strange in the whey left over from making the mozzarella?  It was fine though: mild, sweet, delicious.

Total cheese yield: about 1/2 pound
Total time spent: about an hour

Mysost:
I followed this recipe to try and make this cheese.  So, Gjetost (pronounced Yay-toast!) is made with goat's milk.  What I made was technically called Mysost.  It is a caramelized cheese made from boiling down whey.  Apparently you can also add milk or cream to make it smoother.  I did not do this.  I also think I left it in the pan slightly too long. Mine is not as spreadable as what you can get in the store but it tastes fantastic!  I've never had Mysost before, so I don't know what it's supposed to taste like, but it is kind of like the cheese filling in cheddar cheese sandwich crackers.  But without any of the preservatives!  Tangy, a little sweet, with a milky aftertaste.

The biggest trial and tribulation?  The time.  Dear sweet baby Jesus that whey takes its time reducing!  I probably spent 6 hours on this and I couldn't leave it alone because occasionally it would overheat and explode.  This is not as dangerous as it sounds, it mostly stayed in the pot, but I don't understand what was causing boiling whey to pop off like it did.  I guessed heat, so I tried to keep it on a fairly low simmer.  But whatever it was it didn't affect the final product.

Total cheese yield: a 3" square cube
Total time spent: a dog's age.   Ok, not really, around 6 hours.

With the Ricotta and Mozzarella I made lasagna.  It was pretty awesome.  Go back and visit the lasagna link.  Seriously, I'll wait. ... ... ... Did you scroll past the recipe?  How sweet were those user-submitted photos?  I know, right?!

Bottom Line: It was fun, but next time I'm making paneer.

Credits
Image: Ricotta Salata a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from grongar's photostream