...sheep's milk has significantly more milk solids than cow's milk.
I had read this, but not really appreciated it before! I had my first mostly-successful attempt at the weekend, where the rennet actually worked and I got proper curds (previous attempts only resulted in ricotta which was tasty but not what I was hoping for, but now I have better milk so it's made all the difference) and I was amazed at the amount I got!
Ok, so I definitely made a few mistakes along the way, but I was trying a mozzarella recipe with the hopes of getting at least something I could put on pizza - trying not to set my sights too high - and at least I achieved that goal.
Things I know I did wrong:
- I suspect the milk may have gotten too hot during pasteurising while I was refining the process; I now have that down so it shouldn't be an issue.
- The milk had been frozen (from what I understand not great in itself) and probably also got too hot when I was thawing it out since I wasn't thinking it through and used a hot water bath to thaw it.
- I put Calcium Chloride, in an excess of caution, and then read later that it shouldn't be used for mozzarella because it will make the curd too hard.
- When I started stirring the curds after cutting, I used a slotted spoon with very large slots and they broke up a lot from being pushed through the holes.
- I also probably cooked and stirred them too much at this stage.
Some or all of these factors combined to give tough, rubbery curds that made my teeth squeak. Trying to do the 'stretch' in the hot water with a sample just made them much worse, and also kind of grainy. I guess at this point I may have been able to put them in a mould (maybe under weight?) and make into a hard cheese but I was too tired by then to switch mental tracks. (I was also having a weird thing where the curds I was trying to stretch just wouldn't get hot; it seemed no matter how much heat I applied, even in the microwave, they just absorbed it and cooled right back down in seconds... I was starting to imagine I'd invented some new heat-absorbing material that might be useful to NASA...)
So at that point I took the curds that didn't seem entirely inedible and put them in the fridge in a dish with no liquid. They were starting to mat together and I figured I should be able to turn them into some kind of food once I was more rested.
I put the whey in the fridge too and called it a night, feeling pretty disheartened, but the next day after a good night's sleep I feel like I got things turned around quite well! The clumpy curds grated up into something which definitely passed for pizza mozzarella (although lacking in depth of flavour, I guess due to no culture used; and stretchiness, but probably not the worst I've had)
I used the whey to make ricotta and - omg I don't know if it's because there were some natural cultures in the milk that developed overnight in the fridge but it is the tastiest ricotta I've ever tasted...
And as a side benefit I used the post-ricotta whey to make some spelt soda bread; normally the recipe calls for buttermilk which in my case means faffing around with soya milk and lemon juice, so I had a great reason to use up a couple of pints of spent whey to make 2 loaves of bread
So yeah, a huge amount of stuff, and all of that from less than 4 litres of milk! From what I was reading I could also have skimmed the cream/fat off the whey before making the ricotta and saved it for making butter too - I'll definitely try that next time.
You will notice the curds/whey will go from sweet smelling/tasting to sour smelling/tasting during the make. You don't really need a pH meter or strip when tracking acidity/pH.
I presume this is due to the culture used? I haven't used any so far but I've just ordered "Allround thermophilic cheese starter culture - AT | for Italian style cheeses" and "Pressed cheese mesophilic starter culture - MSE | for Gouda and cheddar" from startercultures.eu - these are the ones they recommended for Caciotta and Manchego respectively. It seems unexpectedly hard to buy them locally; as in I was able to find one place which sells one generic "cheese culture"...
Would I be right in thinking that once I have these starter cultures I can maintain the strains without having to continue purchasing them? I did come across some instructions for cultivating your own thermophilic cultures from yoghurt but I figured I should probably get a sense of how they're supposed to behave before I start to branch out in that area.
It would be fantastic though not to need a pH metre. I have some strips from soap making but they're very broad range (as it turns out too broad for soap also) so probably not accurate enough for the measurements I'm reading here. I love the chart you've listed, thanks for that! Although it does make me want to calibrate my tongue against a pH metre to see if they agree
You can scale it as much as you want. The only real problem is in aging a very small cheese because it will dry out. But that's not really a big problem for a caciotta which you won't be aging very long. I just made a 2 liter, off the cuff cheese that's very similar to caciotta (skipped the stufatura and just let it acidify at room temp for a very long time) and it was great :-)
Awesome! Given that cheese moulds come in 250g size (at least that's the one I have!) I imagine that's a reasonable size? Or would you say there's a larger size that would be a minimum for a cheese that's aged for longer (thinking about working my way up to the Manchego...). I do have a 3d printer so I can feasibly make moulds of whatever size and shape I want up to about 23cm across
