I'm working on a proposal for a short - maybe three, four hours - cheesemaking course to be run through my local council (Whittlesea, in Melbourne's north) and I was wondering if you guys could help. Though I can't cover everything in any course I thought it might be good to run through a few basic cheesemaking skills and have every participant end up with a few basic cheeses they can nosh on
So far these seem pretty obvious:
- a simple cheese curdled with heat and acid: ricotta, naturally.
- whey bread - for those times when you're left with a heap of whey and you don't want to waste it.
But I also wanted to do a simple rennet-and-culture-curdled cheese, and for this one I'm a bit stuck. It's in many ways the most important - amongst other things, it's going to have to be done first, since you always have to wait a bit for it to culture and curdle.
I would LOVE for fellow cheesemaker's suggestions on a simple curdled cheese to make.
POSSIBILITIES:
The obvious one is 30 m mozzarella, which I'm not too fond of - amongst other things, I'm still not sure I've got the recipe quite right! (And it always takes me quite long, closer to 1 hr 30 mins).
Cottage cheese is a possibility, though the recipes I've dug up recommend a 4-8 hour curdle time.
I made a few crescenzas last year, and this recipe seems very attractive, since it would give me an opportunity to talk about brine and brining too, but my recipe (from Mary Karlin's book) does make it sound like it might go on for a bit too long.
Rikki Carroll has a recipe for 'quick fresh cheese' which sounds doable - 1/2 gallon milk, curdled with the aid of rennet, is let set for an hour; it is then drained through a cheesecloth lined colander.
Do any readers have suggestions?