Hi. I'm an absolute beginner at cheese making. I saw a few videos on youtube and was fascinated instantly. It's been months since then. I first tried some acid cheese and that was some fun, but I really wanted to try rennet cheese. So I finally got some rennet a few weeks ago. I put some milk in a sterilized pot, slowly heated it to 90 degrees F and then put in the rennet. I put a cover and let it sit for hours and nothing happened. I tried a few more times with smaller quantities of milk; I tried with bottled water, then distilled water; I tried using more rennet and different brands of milk. Eventually I contacted the company and by the end of that they had decided to just send me some new rennet, just in case the rennet I had was dead.
Today the new rennet arrived. I tried twice the same procedure and again nothing. I would think, then, that I'm probably doing something wrong. Here is what I tried today:
1. I put a small amount of filtered water in the pot and boiled it with the lid on to sterilize the pot. Afterward I rinsed the pot with distilled water from one of those plastic gallon jugs you get at the supermarket.
2. I took approximately a quarter tablet of Junket rennet and dissolved it in about 1/3rd of a cup of distilled water in a cup on the side.
3. I put about 1/8th of a gallon of milk into the pot and heated it up as slowly as I could. When it reached 90 degrees F I turned off the heat and moved the pot to a cold burner.
4. I poured the rennet filled water into the milk and stirred as best I could in an up-down motion for 20-30 seconds.
5. I put the lid on the pot and let the pot sit.
After about 20 minutes I checked on the milk and absolutely nothing had changed. I didn't notice even the smallest hint of curdling. I put the lid back on and waited almost another 40 minutes and checked again and still absolutely nothing. Am I just not waiting long enough? Some of the recipes I've seen say to only wait 10 minutes. I gathered from that that waiting longer, while preferable if you want a better curd, isn't completely necessary for SOMETHING to happen. Does anyone have any ideas why I might be having this problem? I just want to be able to make some cheese =[