Well,I got my calcium chloride in laste week,and Sunday,I made some pepper jack cheese!I got much better results this time!
Here's how it went down....
Since I was making pepper jack,I needed peppers,of course!So,after reading another thread here about how to make sure that the pepper taste permeated though out the cheese,I diced a jalapeno pepper and cut up 3 dried japanese red chili peppers and bolied them in about a 1/2 cup of water,drained them and added the juice to the milk.As you can see,the water is green,there's definately pepper juice in there!
When the milk was at 88 degrees,I set it aside to ripen with the Calcium chloride for 45 mins.
Then it was back to the double boiler to raise the temp to 90 degrees.
Then it was time to add my rennet!I also put some liquid smoke in there to get a good smokey pepper jack flavor!
Then it was time to let the curds set,I monitored the temperature every 5 minutes to make sure it stayed at 90 and didn't go over or under.You can see the curds are gonna be great because the spot I took my readings left a perfectly clean hole in the middle of the curds!
Clean break!
Then I cut the curds with my new cake icing knife I bought this weekend,it worked great!It's hard to see in this pic,but the curds are cut.
Talk about beautiful curds!I couldn't believe what a difference a tiny amount of calcium chloride made!
I was so impressed,I had to take another picture!