the Porter Cheese Experiment

[kenjin]

Hi everyone, I have been experimenting with the production of a Porter cheese, (Cheese with Porter Stout). Think I have cracked it this time although... I added a little too much salt..but apart from that error I believe I am there with it.
With Cahills porter cheese... well the methods are not as traditional or authentic as their company would have you believe.. if you look at their cheeses, you can clearly see that they have simply mixed in chopped up cheese with their brown curds, so really  their cheese is reformed or repressed cheese. I am not saying there's anything wrong with it... but it doesn't seem to me that this is a traditional way of making this cheese.. this is what the larger factories do with offcuts...repress and reform it.
 I have  made my Porter Cheese from the same batch of milk on the same day so it matures evenly.

Anyway.. here's the picture...these 2 slices are from the same wheel,


and here's a close up

[Cheese Head]

Nick, congrats, simply beautiful results!

But details details, how did you make it?

[Lennie]

Yes, and does the flavor of porter come through?  I suppose the brown color from the beer adheres to the curds?

[DeejayDebi]

Looks great! I found the smaller the curds the more they absorbed the color and flavor.

[zenith1]

Nick,that is a great effort! I would love to know the details of your process(sorry if you have already posted them)

[MarkShelton]

I agree! Lets have the recipe It certainly looks delicious! Are you a homebrewer as well? Did you make the beer and add it to the cheese?

[kenjin]

Sorry for the late reply, I forgot about this post.

My method.

Well firstly, I honestly don't believe the dark brown colour is from the stout, I have tried and tried and the colour of the stout hardly absorbs into the curds.

So, well I wont go into huge details as the method is the same for any farmhouse cheddar.
The only difference is, I split the milk into 2 separate bowls, and on 1 added brown colouring (to the milk, not the curds). So I ended up with 2 bowls of curds, one brown one white.

As for the stout, I reduced it down by about 50%, then added it to the brown curds after draining and gave it a good mix before salting.

To be honest about the flavour, I think I ruined it by over salting. Its a shame but it was more of an experiment on the method rather than the taste.


If you look at Cahill's Porter Cheese, it seems to me they are using chopped up cheddar for the white. So next time I am going to try and make a 30% volume of dyed milk curds to 70% volume of chopped cheddar then try and repress it...

[Boofer]

What is the brown coloring?

-Boofer-

[JMB]

Very cool look.  I had some squeeky fresh curd that had been soaked in beer.  The dark beer stained the outside of the curd a little but the curds hadn't soaked in the beer very long either.  Don't really know how it would have come out had we pressed it up because we ate them all.  It was fantastic party cheese, no aging required.
Jen

[mightyjesse]

Ah HAH! I suspected something like this was how it worked, which is exactly how I ended up with my earlier electric green cheese. Now to do one and not get carried away with the food coloring. Electric green is not the best color for cheese...

[DeejayDebi]

It was pretty though Jessie!