Humboldt Fog fiascos and rescue?

[mathewjones]

Hi All,

I've never tasted real Humboldt Fog, but people rave about it so I thought I would give it a try.

I'm basing my make on Brie's recipe elsewhere in this forum:
http://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,2019.msg23336.html#msg23336

First obstacle: I cannot find goat milk in any shops where I live that has not been ultra-pasteurized. So, first I accidentally tried it with ultra-pasteurized goat milk from Woodman's (Periwinkle brand). No clean break, no proper curds, even after 24 hours and quite a lot of rennet and CaCl2. Then I tried it with Goat Milk Kefir from Trader Joe, figuring that that is NOT ultra-pasteurized and should mainly be just goat milk that already has some cultures added. Same thing. No proper curd after 24 hours.

So, now, I'm $40 USD into this, with 2 gals of barely-curdled goat milk. So what's a poor boy to do? I mean, I actually do like the taste of goat milk and goat kefir, but I can't drink 2 gals of it before it all goes bad. And I'm not about to just dump $40 USD all over my tomato plants.

Hmm, what does one do with useless cheesemaking leftovers: Make Humboldt Ricotta!!!

So, here's what I did:

- Heat 2 gal of barely-curdled goat milk to 195˚F.  Yes, I know this will kill all the cultures. But see below for my evil scheme!
- Add 1/2 cup red wine vinegar per gallon to curdle. White wine vinegar would've been better, but at this point, really? I'm grasping at straws here.
- Cool and strain through cheese cloth. Pre-drain in a bag overnight. This Pre-Draining might be important. There's another thread somewhere on here that emphasizes the usefulness of pre-draining. Apologies to the original poster about that subject.
- Next day, make a spritz of cultures to add back the cultures that I killed by heating: 1/32 tsp Flora danica, 1/64 tsp P.candidum, 1/64 tsp G.candidum in 10 ml NC water. Break up the curd mass and spritz curds liberally all over. i used a cheap 5 ml perfume atomizer from Amazon: 3 for about 9 bucks USD; seems like a good investment so far.
- Pack curds into two chèvre and two valençay forms (because those were what I had on hand - another simpler option would be camembert forms like the original Humboldt Fog.) Drain for 48 hours. If you're using forms where it makes sense to flip the cheese, then do so (e.g., cam forms). If using weird forms like valençay, then maybe don't bother. After having done already the pre-draining, these didn't really shrink much and kept to the shape of the forms. So I recommend pre-draining if you care about final shape and size.
- Mix ash & salt and spread all over surfaces.
- Store in cave and watch to see whether Pc forms a white bloom. It did.
- Let Pc cover cheese all over (about 1 week), then wrap with cheese paper and store in regular fridge.

So that's where I'm at right now. I think I'll crack the first one in about one week (~3 weeks after the initial make, ~ 2 weeks after ash & salt)

Fig 1 shows the cheeses immediately after unhooping.
Fig 2 shows immediately after ashing.
Fig 3 shows 4 days after ash.
Fig 4 shows about 1 week after ash and just before wrapping and storing in regular fridge. The goofy designs on top are from the goofy shape of the rack. I flipped them halfway through - prolly not necessary.

They smell good, and they look good. Texture is firm, but soft. We'll see in about one or two weeks when I cut one open for a preliminary taste test at 3-4 weeks after ash. It could be a disaster, but I have no reason to think so at present.

Anyway, I thought some of you might get a laugh out of this utter fiasco. It remains to be seen whether it's been rescued. Couple of weeks, yet, I think.

Cheers,

Matt

[Bantams]

Interesting idea, but I have a concern.
Your base cheese (ricotta) is cooked and so it should theoretically not have any live cultures in it (except the molds, and anything it has picked up post-cooking. It certainly won't have the correct array of meso cultures required to allow it to ripen safely and keep away pathogens.
I personally would not risk eating it, although I'm sure there are braver people out there. But the only traditionally made type of aged cheese that starts with an acidic coagulated curd (vs cultured) is ricotta salata, which has a low moisture content/high salt content and thus is safe from pathogens.
Growing a bloomy rind on a moist cheese without culture is a very risky endeavor, in my opinion. 
I'm sorry!

[broombank]

I must commend you for your inventiveness. I don't think I am as cautious as the much more experienced Bantams. I use my nose to tell me whether its safe to eat. I look forward to a report on how it tastes.

[mathewjones]

Interesting idea, but I have a concern.
Your base cheese (ricotta) is cooked and so it should theoretically not have any live cultures in it (except the molds, and anything it has picked up post-cooking. It certainly won't have the correct array of meso cultures required to allow it to ripen safely and keep away pathogens.
I personally would not risk eating it, although I'm sure there are braver people out there. But the only traditionally made type of aged cheese that starts with an acidic coagulated curd (vs cultured) is ricotta salata, which has a low moisture content/high salt content and thus is safe from pathogens.
Growing a bloomy rind on a moist cheese without culture is a very risky endeavor, in my opinion. 
I'm sorry!

@Bantams
Thanks for this advice. The safety issue really had not even occurred
to me at all. So thanks!

However, I did include a fair amount of mesophilic Flora danica bacterial culture in addition to the Pc and Gc molds, and it was incorporated throughout the curds, not just spritzed onto the surface. Do you think this might sufficiently mitigate the safety concern by competing with harmful bacteria just as it would if it hadn't been heat-killed in the first place?

Thanks,

Matt

[mikekchar]

It should work.  There are Greek cheeses made this way (minus the PC).

[mathewjones]

It should work.  There are Greek cheeses made this way (minus the PC).

Shucks. I thought I came up with this all by myself, without having to rely on six thousand years of Greek cheesemaking experience.

But did they use $3 perfume spritzers?

Hah! I think not.

[mikekchar]

I was rushing out the door when I wrote the above :-)  One more quick thing.  In my experiments with bloomy rind UHT cheeses, the paste doesn't really soften.  So you'll probably find that the texture won't be quite right.  But it should still be interesting.

[Bantams]

Sorry! I totally missed the part where you added some Flora Danica to the curd mix. Good call there!

[mathewjones]

08-21-21
I cracked one open today, after they had been wrapped in double-ply cheese paper and stored in a minicave in the regular fridge (~40˚F, ~45% RH). Figure 5. At 3 weeks in the fridge (~4 weeks after ashing), I'm happy to report that this was really quite a decent cheese.

- The rind is about 2 mm thick, just slightly rubbery, and mild flavored with just a hint of ammonia, milder than the rinds on many bries or camemberts that I've had.
- The paste is uniformly smooth and creamy throughout, not crumbly anywhere, but also not runny under the rind.
- The taste is very nice, like a slightly goaty, slightly salty camembert.

So, not Humboldt Fog, but definitely a cheese that I'm happy to eat plenty of and to show off to friends.

[mikekchar]

AC4U!  Very nice :-)  Very similar texture to the UHT lactic cheeses I did last summer.  As you say, different, but not really inferior.

[mathewjones]

AC4U!  Very nice :-)  Very similar texture to the UHT lactic cheeses I did last summer.  As you say, different, but not really inferior.

Thanks for the cheese!

But let me get this straight: You've done UHT lactic cheeses before? On purpose?

Did they form a curd? How long did that take? Days and days? What did I do wrong? Just not wait long enough? The milk didn't look like it was ever gonna go anywhere, but after 24 hours and rennet and CaCl2, patience just isn't my strong point.

Thanks, Matt

[mikekchar]

Yes.  UHT lactic cheeses on purpose. :-)  Mainly to see what's possible.

The term "lactic cheese" usually means a cheese that is coagulated with lactic acid rather than with rennet.  The lactic acid comes from a starter culture.  To understand how this works, you have to understand a bit about how curds coagulate.

There are 2 kinds of curd coagulation in cheese making: enzymatic coagulation and acid coagulation.  They are very different and work in different ways chemically.  I'll spare you the long version of this story, but basically rennet works by altering the milk protein so that it can stick together with calcium as a glue.  Acid works by changing the average electrical charge of the proteins, allowing them to kind of stick together like a sand castle.  Rennet cheeses tend to have stronger, rubbery curds and acid cheeses tend to have weaker, "paste-like" curds.

When doing acid coagulated curds, it's important to realise that the pH (acidity level) at which the curds coagulates depends on the temperature.  So at room temperature, milk coagulates at a pH of about 4.7 (acidity of yogurt -- not a coincidence ;-) ).  At 50 C it coagulates at a pH of about 5.2 (about the same as mozzarella).  At 85 C it coagulates at a pH of about 6.0 (about the same as ricotta).  You can make acid coagulated cheeses at all of those temperatures.

One kind of cheese you can make is labneh -- yogurt cheese.  You make yogurt.  You drain the yogurt for a few days, flipping it over and over again.  You have cheese.  Well, I think labneh doesn't actually drain it to that extent.  However, a very famous cheese does: Brie de Melun.  They literally make a yogurt with a mesophilic culture, then drain it and grow penecillium candidum on the outside.  I've done this a few times with good cheese milk and it is awesome.  Total PITA to drain the curds because they are *tiny* and take *days and days* to drain, but well worth it, IMHO.

As you have made ricotta, you probably noticed that when you added the acid to the milk, you got pretty big curds.  Not as big as rennet curds, but still pretty chonky.  Why, do you suppose, yogurt has curds that are so small you can't see them, but ricotta has fairly big curds.  Is it the temperature?  As it turns not: no.  Not really.

The size of the curds depends on the speed at which it reaches the coagulation point. I won't get into the details, but the faster you get to that point, the bigger the curds will be.  When you dump in a whole bunch of acid, it reaches the coagulation point super fast and so the curds are really big.  If you make yogurt, it reaches the coagulation point in... 8 hours or so?  That's why the curds are super, duper small.

But there is a hack.  It's a beautiful hack.  Remember that I said that the curd coagulates at different acidities depending on the temperature?  So you can have you milk at 6 C, add enough acid to get it to a pH of 5.2, then *heat the milk* to 50 C -- And you will get curds!  The faster you heat the milk, the bigger the curds.

So what you can do is add a mesophilic culture (buttermilk is traditional) to milk, let it sit at room temperature until the pH goes to about 5.3 and then heat the milk to between 40-50 C.  This will coagulate the milk and you will get a cheese called Ayib.  You can absolutely do the same thing with ricotta as well (though usually I use a thermophilic culture): Add you culture, wait until the pH is about 6.0 and then heat the milk to 85 C (actually usually 85 C slowly and then up to 92+ C quickly, for reasons I don't understand -- but every single PDO description of that style of cheese says exactly the same thing...)  It makes the best whole milk ricotta you have ever had in your life.  A must make IMHO.  Again, this cheese goes under different names in different parts of the world.

So, let's back up a bit to UHT milk.  UHT is bad for cheese, right?  Yes.  It is.  However....  There is a catch.  UHT is bad for cheese for 2 reasons.  The first is that the whey proteins get "denatured" (messed up) and they get tangled up with the casein protein (the protein that we make cheese from).  It physically stops the rennet from working (again, I won't go into details).  The other problem with it is that the messed up whey proteins hold on to a lot of moisture, so even if you manage to make curds, it won't drain well.

Probably you have seen recipes for yogurt that asks you to "scald the milk".  You raise the temperature of the milk almost all the way up to boiling, then cool the milk and add the yogurt culture.  This makes thicker yogurt.  The reason it makes thicker yogurt is because the whey proteins are tangled up in the casein and hanging on to moisture.

So you can absolutely, 100% make a lactic "yogurt cheese" like Brie to Melun using UHT milk.  You make yogurt with a mesophilic starter.  You kill yourself draining the damn thing.  You hope it grows white mold on the outside even though it's super moist.  And you do your best.  It works fine.  Unfortunately, it doesn't make a great cheese.  It's not bad, but the tangled up proteins stop it from getting soft like a Brie should.   If you age it long enough, though, it really does have a nice flavour -- just the texture isn't quite right.

You can also make an Ayib cheese (pH of about 5.2).  Again, the texture is just wrong.  It's not bad, but it's not right.  If you age the cheese (and I tried growing both PC and geotrichum on it), it stays pretty dry, but eventually has a nice flavour and actually interesting texture -- more like a cheddar, though.  And for a whole milk ricotta -- well... that's exactly how it should be.

Hope that made some sense.  I know it's a book even though I left out most of the really technical bits.  Feel free to ask me any questions and I'll try to answer.  I won't promise the answers will be correct, though.  I'm still learning!

[mathewjones]

Thanks for that great explanation! And I don't mind technical bits. When I'm not making cheese I'm a neurobiologist.

Cheers,

Matt