Pressed Cheeses - Cheesecloth Ball Method

[Cheese Head]

Tripped over this website for Vella Cheese Company, Inc. based in Sonoma California USA.

In their picture tour of making Dry Jack Cheese, they don't use common hoops or molds to press their cut curds in, but instead press a cheesecloth wrapped "ball" of curds under a weight. This results in slightly uneven shaped wheels and on "top" side of wheel with cloth fold lines and a dimple in middle where string was tied.

There are 8 webpages of pictures and a little text, click right arrow to scroll through them.

Has anyone tried this method and have any tricks or traps to share?

Note: Repaired link on Nov 27, 2010.

[wharris]

Very nice.

I want that 1200 gal vat.

[DeejayDebi]

Well they save a fortune on molds that's for sure!

[FRANCOIS]

Only because they can sell random weight cheese.  If you are making cheese to be sold by weight, you need molds to get consistent wheels for cutting.

The cheese cloth method works fine if you don't mind fiddling with clothes and cleaning the stuff.  Our plant had heaps and heaps of cloth when we switched out to more modern methods and molds.  I think they ended up giving most of the cloth away.

[DeejayDebi]

I would think fussing with all that cloth would be a real PITA! Nice little gimick though belly buttons in cheese!

[Tropit]

I want to try this on a smaller scale with some goudas.

Vella is very famous for their dry jack BTW.

[Alex]

You can use disposeable table cloth.

[vogironface]

Hey John,

All of my 4" cheeses have a belly button as well.  They are all outies.    See below.

My lathe jaws will not grip on the outside so I need to drill a hole in order to machine my followers.  The result is this fine little button on all my cheeses.  Reminds me of a very full baby's belly.

[Alex]

Turn a dowel to fit to the hole and fill in the hole.

[vogironface]

Alex,

I was actually thinking of a dowel to fit the hole that widened to fit the inside of the spring.  That will keep the spring centered in the follower.  Just havn't done it yet.

[Alex]

Good idea, you kill two birds with one shot

[Boofer]

There's a video somewhere that shows this woman in a dimly lit room putting cheese curds in a cloth. She presses the cloth-wrapped cheese ball under a board and the whey drains off either onto the floor or into a bucket, I'm not sure which. Seems like the woman is either Italian, Romanian, or similar. She wore a babushka.

This seems to be traditional, Old-World cheesemaking.

Anyone have that video? I looked but no luck.

-Boofer-

[vogironface]

There's a video somewhere that shows this woman in a dimly lit room putting cheese curds in a cloth. She presses the cloth-wrapped cheese ball under a board and the whey drains off either onto the floor or into a bucket, I'm not sure which. Seems like the woman is either Italian, Romanian, or similar. She wore a babushka.

This seems to be traditional, Old-World cheesemaking.

Anyone have that video? I looked but no luck.

-Boofer-

Here it is.

[Boofer]

Thanks, Ben.

Yep, that's the one. A definitive example of the "cheesecloth ball method", though I'm not sure she used cheesecloth.

Wonder what her psi is with those two rock slabs. I looked very closely on the video and could not see where she had kept her pH meter.  <<<-- hey, look, a smiley!

-Boofer-

[DeejayDebi]

Thanks Ben!

I love watching those videos.  It reminds me of my childhood. All the old timers did things that way. They wasted nothing and did it all by hand. I don't know how they did it all. God Bless them.