Cheese Making Best Practice: Checking for Curd Clean Break
After the coagulation sets the curd, determining if the curd is ready for cutting is called checking for a Clean Break. This is a critical point in cheese making using rennet. If you cut the curd too early, it will be mushy and cut poorly, resulting in poor quality cut curds. If you cut too late, the curd will already be expelling whey from it's surface and shrinking resulting in uneven density cut curds, as dryer at surface and moister cut curds from interior.
Common Best Practices for checking for a Clean Break are:
- Inserting a clean finger into the uncut curd at a ~30 degree angle from horizontal and then lifting up vertically. If the curds lift and break cleanly around your finger, then you have a Clean Break, if they don't and leave a significant residue on your finger, then the curd is not ready for cutting. Let the curd rest covered for another ~1/2 hour and check again.
- Use a knife in the same fashion as above, this is more visual and tougher to gauge.
