Casatica di bufala

[NimbinValley]

I have seen this cheese and wondering if anyone has a recipe.   From pictures I am thinking it's a stabilised cam type of cheese with a Geo rind but I have no idea.   Anyone have any information?   Thanks.   

[mikekchar]

Cowgirl Creamery says it's a type of stracchino, which has become one of my favourite types of cheese (just opened one yesterday :-) ).  I can well imagine that with buffalo milk it would be *incredible*.  I've made one with Jersey milk before and the creaminess is amazing.  I haven't actually aged any of mine past a week or two, but I can give you a bit of a hint.  If you were using standardised milk (say 3.5% protein and 3.6% fat), you'd want to aim for about 18% yield.  With buffalo milk, you'll have to do the yield math to figure it out.  I'm guessing it will be well into the low 20's.  If you increase the moisture levels, it will be hard to dry out the cheese enough for the geo to grow well.

I tend to use this recipe: https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/crescenza-recipe  It is interesting as it starts with salted milk (in order to slow down the culture action.  I actually up the salt in this recipe by about 25% (I use 7 grams of salt per liter of milk).  With the expensive sea salt that I use, this actually makes the salt a significant portion of the cost.  Most of the salt actually drains out in the whey and even with the large amount of salt that I use, the cheese is not very salty at all.  I've not been able to taste an authentic stracchino/crescenza so I'm not sure exactly what salt level is expected.  I think that no matter how much salt you use, the end result will be quite low in salt.  However, this really accentuates the milk qualities, so it might be fine.  I'm not 100% convinced that pre-salting the milk is really a requirement, but you would have to play with the recipe to get the correct effects.

I would say that the most important thing you want is a long, slow drainage at room temp for 12 hours or so.  This *really* develops the flavour.  The cheese eventually becomes fairly tart, which is important because of the lack of salt flavour.  However, you also want the fermentation character of the thermophilic starter culture to shine through, as this is what highlights the milk and cream flavours.  The low temps with a thermophilic culture will really make it struggle and generate flavour.  After 2-3 weeks you get some proteolysis and the paste goes from being like clotted cream to being more like a camembert.  It's important not to be too high in moisture or else the cheese will collapse.  I think with geo coverage (which I haven't done yet) it will go gooey even faster, so make sure to keep it down to 18% yield (again, for standardised milk -- buffalo milk will come out much higher).

Anyway, I hope you do this and report back with results.  I am absolutely addicted to stracchino/crescenza now and if I don't have it in the house I'm pretty grumpy :-)