I'm just starting out on some Edam Boule cheeses today with a recipe from Mary Karlin's cheesemaking book. Now, just reading through the steps and I notice she's got one step that tells you to reserve some whey and heat it up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. (For people in the decimal gang such as myself, that's 50 degrees Celsius.)
Crikey! I'll be making this cheese with my standard house culture - a heirloom mesophilic yoghurt that's a mix of a few different varieties of LB. For yoghurt I just heat this culture up to around 25 degrees Celsius and let it do its thang until it clabbers; for cheeses I normally push it up to around 40 degrees - tops!
So the 'put the cheeses in 50 degree whey for half an hour' step has me kind of puzzled, and kind of fretting about the health of the LB. A mixture of the two. Frettzled. Is that a thing?
I guess the point of the step is to get the kind of 'stretch the protein' effect that happens in mozzarella and haloumi, so the texture of the final cheese will be affected. But the heat isn't so strong in this step, so the LB won't be affected?
Now talking about the 'heat tolerance for lacto-bacilli' is probably like asking about the favourite foods of mammals, or something like that. Kind of depends on the particular variety, doesn't it? But when we narrow it down to lacto-bacilli of the mesophilic variety used for cheesemaking, what sort of heat tolerance do these creatures have? Because I'm guessing - even for LB - 50 degrees Celsius would make for a *very* unpleasant kind of summer's day.
