I have made my first batch of cream cheese as the first stage of Gavin's "Boursin" herb and garlic cream cheese recipe and wondered what yield I should expect after draining since it looked less to the eye than Gavin obtained.
I used 2L or 3.5 pints of pasteurised, unhomogenised, non-standardised whole milk and 1 cup of creme fraiche I had just made with unthickened cream with Meso Aroma B.
After heating the milk and creme fraiche to 45C and adding 1/3 cup of lemon juice and 1/4 tsp rennet in 1/4 cup non-chlorinated water I let it stand for 40 minutes. The temperature did drop to around 35C during this time.
The curd was extremely fragile as Gavin warned but it did have a small grainy structure. I ladled it carefully into butter muslin but it was very loose.
After 2h30 of draining my final yield of cream cheese was 440g or one pound. The whey which I collected had visible fat on the top, looked pretty milky but did not have any visible solids settled on the bottom so I guess the muslin did catch all solids.
Since it looked like about two thirds of what Gavin obtained I cut back the whipped cream to 2/3, initially reduced the salt to 2tsp then upped it to the full 1tbsp but cut the herbs back to 2/3 and left it there.
What would you expect my cream cheese yield to be at the point where it had drained given that recipe?
For reference his video that I followed is here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Awi6NExCBE