Failing at squeaky cheddar curds

[WetNugget]

Hello! I'm not sure if this forum is dead, but I thought I'd give it a try. I posted this on reddit too in case you see it there.

I'm trying to make squeaky cheddar curds for poutine, following the recipe from Mastering Basic Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell. I've had 4 batches fail in the same way now and I'd really appreciate some help.

The problem with these batches is that the curd slab that forms after draining is weak and wet, like waterlogged. When I press it with my finger, it gives and it doesn't spring back. It does not squeak at all, and when cutting the slab in half and stacking it, it does not knit at all. The slab looks ok, even a little like very long cooked chicken breast strands, but the texture is all off. I make sure to keep it at 37C during this cheddaring step and I even place a Ziplock bag full of warm water on top. No dice.

I am currently located in Spain, so the links to the ingredients will be in Spanish. I'm using pasteurized, non-homogenized milk. This specific batch was a test batch of 1L of milk, 0.25g of these mesophilic cultures, 0.75ml of a 30% w/w calcium chloride solution, and 0.6ml of this rennet.

I am using a sous vide water bath to keep the temperatures stable. I don't have a pH meter, I tried an Extech PH110 bought off Amazon that could not keep calibration to save its life, so I returned it.

These videos are from the latest batch. At this point the curds have been cooking in the whey at 39.5C for 1h45mins. I do not usually cook this long, I just left them there to see if cooking longer would make a difference. When pressed, they seem to pop and squirt a bunch of trapped whey, and they look weak and raw inside, which I guess is the cause of the cheddar slab being wet and weak.

I try cutting the curds as 1cm cubes, but I have no way to cut horizontally so I break up larger curd chunks when stirring. Notably, after cutting and stirring for the very first time, no matter what I do the curds start to flake off tiny rice-sized pieces. I'd say about 50% of the curds stay as cubes and the rest flake off. But as you can see the whey stays clear.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong? Thanks!

[tecla]

I'm doing my best to help keep the forum from being dead, so tell your friends to join too!

For the curds, I can't tell super well, but they look either too big, or weren't stirred for long enough in the whey to get the moisture out. I typically will keep stirring if the inside has that egg-white texture.

If the curd slabs after that are wet and weak and the curds don't want to consolidate into slabs, even after draining for quite a while, then unfortunately the pH is probably not right. You can taste the whey, and if it already tastes sour by the time you are trying to settle the curds to make the slabs, then they will have a hard time knitting. See here for a guide you can use without a pH meter, it's a little ways down in the recipe: https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/reblochon-recipe-traditional

If that's happening, you may be acidifying your curds too fast, maybe the amount of culture is too high. I have this problem a lot with the raw milk I use, where it's hard to slow down the acidification properly. Yours is pasteurized, but each milk and culture will respond a little differently.

I'm sorry your extech gave you problems. I have one, it calibrates and holds calibration surprisingly well, and I use it all the time. But having a good pH meter will really help here in diagnosing what's happening.

[WetNugget]

Thank you so much for your response tecla!

So, turns out I simply had been running into a well-known phenomenon called case hardening. I noticed this term when reading Caldwell's second book (Artisan cheesemaking), she mentions it in Chapter 2, "Cutting the curd" section. Also found it clearly spelled out in Cheese Problems Solved by Woodhead (2007), chapter 38:

Case hardening is caused by an excessive increase in the rate of cooking of the curds/whey mixture during cheesemaking.

(...)

Case hardening can be avoided by reducing the rate of increase in temperature during the early stages of cooking and/or by introducing (or extending) a healing time between cutting and the start of cooking.

(...)

Just because I have a sous vide circulator doesn't mean I can crank the temperature directly from 32C to 39C without monitoring the rate of increase I'm running another batch right now, I've just drained the whey and I can feel the texture is right, the slab isn't soft nor waterlogged

And also yes, my curds are being cut too big. I need to source a horizontal curd harp somehow!

[tecla]

Yep, usually you want to increase the temperature slowly, 1-2 degrees F per minute at most, often even slower. Also, stirring aggressively can do that, so you want to stir and move the curds the least aggressively necessary to accomplish the job. In some cases that ends up being pretty aggressive (spino-like cutting of curds for parmesan styles), and in some is super light handling, like in reblochon, so it takes some experience to know what "aggressive" means.

The goal is to have the osmotic pressure pulling whey out of the curd be as constant as possible throughout the curd so it dries as evenly as it can before draining the curds. Definitely easier said than done, so these observations you're making are building experience that will serve you well down the line.