Author Topic: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?  (Read 2574 times)

psearle

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Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« on: July 25, 2014, 03:00:08 PM »
This season I've been able to make some very nice lactic cheeses (Crottin de Chavignol style) from my goats milk.  They taste good at 2-3 weeks and really great at 4-6 weeks.  Hopefully I've managed to attach a picture of some at 6 weeks old.

I see from "French Cheeses" that the AOC forbids the use of frozen curd.  This tells me that there is a way of freezing lactic curd for use at a later date which would be very helpful to me to deal with the current glut of milk and to keep making cheeses in the winter.

Has anyone done this or have any advice on the best way to do it? 


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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #1 on: July 28, 2014, 09:30:03 PM »
I can't say from personal experience, but Rogue Creamery (among other sites) says you can freeze cheese curds.  http://www.roguecreamery.com/store/content/50/CheeseCare/

That said, they don't intend you to make lactic cheese with them, just eat them.  Why not try it and see, then tell the rest of us?
before goats, store bought milk = chevre & feta, with goats, infinite possibilities, goatie love, lotta work cleaning out the barn!

Tomer1

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #2 on: July 28, 2014, 10:35:08 PM »
I've frozen a lactic cheese before, made a huge wheel and it was ripening quicker than I could consume it...   when defrosting the texture was rather grainy but the flavor has increase dramaticly and it became extremly sharp.

psearle

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2014, 08:29:15 AM »
Thanks for that, Tomer.

I regularly freeze our Tommes and also our Camembert style goats cheese.  The latter we freeze when it has a good coat of PC but has not yet started to soften.  When we thaw it we can restart the ripening process (although this can take a couple of weeks to start) or just bake the cheese in brie baker with a little olive oil to make a delicious meal.  I shall freeze one or two of our 3 week+ crottins and bring them out to try in a month or so.

I still want to crack this freezing the pre-drained curd and then thawing it, packing into moulds and developing as normal.  With a good stock of frozen curd I could make as make as many or as few crottins as I wanted to at a later date.  I will post the results of my experiments when I have them.

Cheers

Peter

psearle

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #4 on: August 31, 2014, 09:56:32 AM »
Well, I now have results from my first experiment in making lactic cheeses from frozen lactic curds and I'm quite pleased.  I made a batch of Crottins des Chavignol on July 25th and, after predraining the curds, I packed half into 6 tall beaker moulds as normal and the other half (just over 1 kg) I put into a lidded plastic box and into one of our freezers.  I aged the moulded crottins in the normal way and on August 14th I let the box of frozen curd defrost slowly at room temperature overnight before packing it into 5 tall beaker moulds and starting the normal Crottin aging process.

The picture below shows one of the normally processed Crottins from the batch at 38 days old (on the left) and a couple of the frozen/defrosted Crottins from the same batch 17 days from defrosting and moulding (on the right).  The frozen/defrosted one is less dense and has not had time yet to develop a good surface coat of mould but the texture is fine and the taste is excellent.  I intend to continue to age the remaining frozen/defrosted ones to confirm that they progress as normal after their period of "suspended animation". 

In the meantime, I have 17 litres of goats' milk cooling from pasteurisation at the moment which will go into my bain marie "vat" later to produce a couple of kilos of predrained lactic curd to freeze tomorrow.  I plan to be defrosting and aging this in December for eating at Christmas!

 

gjfarm

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #5 on: August 31, 2014, 04:34:04 PM »
Thank you for the update psearle.  I will have to give this a try.  At this time of year the goats are producing like crazy and it would take up a lot less room in the freezer than the  milk bottles.  Would love to hear results from others using this technique.

psearle

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #6 on: August 31, 2014, 04:55:52 PM »
Good luck with it and do let us know how you get on; as you say, this is a peak production time for the goats and we have to store the stuff somehow.  One kilo of curd takes up a lot less freezer space than the equivalent 9 or 10 litres of milk!

Another advantage is that you can freeze the curd in small quantities, just enough to produce the small number of cheeses you may want.  I plan to freeze the 2 kilos of curd I expect from the current batch in 4 or 5 separate lots, each of which will produce 2 or 3 Crottins when defrosted.

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Re: Freezing lactic curd for later use - any advice?
« Reply #7 on: November 10, 2014, 01:20:06 PM »
Hi Kathi, welcome, see thread here: http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,13138.0.html

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