P&H milk and CaCl (again)

[Lloyd]

I regularly make a Camembert style, which goes down very well.  I make it with Pasteurised, un-homogenised milk.  The only problem is that the milk comes from a supermarket, and I would much rather support a local dairy farmer.  Plus I often find the shelf empty.

So today I tried the same recipe, but used the local milk, which is P&H.  Flocuation time was almost the same as a batch made with my normal milk, but the curds had very little strength, and fell apart. Draining is going to take forever, and flipping them will be very interesting  I do add CaCl.

How do I know if my CaCl solution is any good?

Is there a limit to how much CaCl I can add?  To 3l of milk I added aprox 2ml of 33%.

If I add some cream, and reduce the milk by the same quantity, will this help with the Calcium levels, or is it likely that the pasteurisation process  has caused the issue, rather than the homogenisation?

[mikekchar]

Too much CaCl2 will make the cheese bitter.  Different people have different thresholds for tasting CaCl2, but I once put too much CaCl2 in my brine by accident and could really taste it in the resultant cheese.

Is the new milk homogenised?  If so, I would guess that's your problem.  The homogenisation process interferes with the coagulation of the casein.  I'm not entirely sure what the  mechanism is.  Interestingly, I have heard that for Camembert style cheeses some producers *prefer* homogenised milk because you get higher yield.  I've made many acid set cheeses and, indeed, I get much higher yield from homogenised milk.

Anyway, if homogenisation is the problem, I don't think CaCl2 will solve it.  You can always try with a small amount of milk: heat up 200 ml of milk, add culture and split it into 4 small cups of 50 ml each.  Keep them in a water bath in a small pot.  Dissolve some CaCl2 in a measured amount of water and add various amounts with an eye dropper to the milk (1 drop is 0.05 ml).    So if you usually add something like 0.3 ml of CaCl2 (@33%) to 1 litre of milk (i.e. 6 drops) you can add those 6 drops to 20 ml of water and each of the 50 ml cups of milk will need 1 ml (20 drops) of the resultant liquid to get your normal dosing rate.  Um... if I've done my math right...  It's early in the morning right now... :-P  Do the same kind of calculation for the rennet.

Anyway, I'm in a similar dilemma.  The only non-homogenised milk I can get is from half way across the country.  However, I go with it because as much as I would like to support local business, I also want to support businesses that make a product that I want.  There is a dairy a few towns over that is experimenting with cream lined milk, although they are charging ~$7 for 900 ml!  I'm hopefully they will decide to make a cheaper product.  It is slowly starting to get more popular here, I think (in Japan).

[awakephd]

Lloyd, I regularly make camembert from P&H milk. Yes, the curds are weak and often shatter, but I still get quite tasty and respectable results. Adding more cream, in my experience, does not help with the curds (though it is delicious in the results!). In fact, I've begun to suspect that adding cream tends to give me weaker curds.

[Lloyd]

Thanks both for your replies.   Testing various dosing rates with smaller milk samples sounds like an excellent idea. I've always suspected that my supermarket milk curds shatter; the local dairy ones completely disintegrated.

The cheese I usually make is very creamy (channel Island milk), and that is what people like and comment on, so I need to try and reproduce this.  The local farmer does have Jerseys in his herd, so that's a good start.  I may try adding double cream to semi-skimmed, aiming for a fat level of around 5%.

I've just salted the 6 cheeses I made last night (3xsupermarket, 3xlocal), and although the local milk ones were soft to start with (it was 5 hours before I could flip them), they have now overtaken the supermarket milk ones, and are much firmer. Also their pH has dropped considerably more.  It's going to be a long 3 week wait....

[Lloyd]

Well did a test a couple of nights ago.  Four samples, with 1x, 2x , 4x and 6x my normal amount of CaCl.

The amount of CaCl certainly affected the floc time - the more the faster.  The higher two concentrations produced marginally better curds, but still not the quality I'm after.

[Lloyd]

Cracked open the test cheese last night.  Externally no different from the ones I normally make.  But internally, the outer part had started to run, and it was very runny - the consistency of water. The solid was quite soft and moist.  Taste was quite strong, bit of a twang to it,  and the paste was stronger than the rind.

Took one to work today to test on colleagues, and the reaction was very mixed.  Some loved it, some not so sure (found it too strong).

I suspect the curds retained too much whey, so I need to work out a better sequence of cutting etc., than I use for my 'normal' make.

Pictures attached show the 'normal' on the right, and experimental make on the left.