Thanks for allowing me to join this amazing-looking forum!
We make cheese from our raw goats' milk. When everything is right, it is a lot like mozzarella, and ages to be a lot like Romano. We eat it.
We accumulate milk in refrigerator until we can put a respectable amount into a 6-gal pot, add half or less tablet of Fromase rennet, heat slowly (an hour or two) until too hot to keep hands on sides of pot, curd rises, we drain into a bag, salt, and hang. That is it.
In Winter, milk production is low, so we accumulate milk over a week or two until we have enough to make a batch. Usually works as above. A batch we have now has refused to curdle. We added rennet again, heated again, only a thin scum of curd on top. The only difference I suspect may be causing this is that the milk all froze, waiting to be made into cheese. We thawed it slowly in cool room, it was no more sour than usual, not significantly sour, when we put it in the pot.
Was freezing the reason?
Can I/how can I salvage this?
THANKS!
At this point I would change directions and make ricotta out of it if I were you. There are too many variables at play to say whether the freezing was the cause of the failure or not.
Thank you, River Bottom!
Recipe I found for Ricotta calls for bringing milk to rolling boil, add lemon juice. Can i use vinegar? How much for about 4 gallons of milk?
Yes use vinegar pour it in from high up (18 inches above pot to help the acid make it all the way to the bottom of the milk). Revepie I have says to heat milk to at least 90c then add 1l of vinegar for 100l of milk so just reduce that to your milk volume. That was for 7% vinegar I think.
Hello,
If you want to increase the yield and get a more reproductible coagulation, you should first disolve your tablet in one cup of room temperature non chlorinated water per tablet, wait 20 minutes then add it to milk at 35°C/95°F, mix well for 30sec-1minute then let sit at this temperature for 30-60 minutes, without stirring, until you get a clean break. Once the milk is coagulated, you can cut it in cubes then slowly stir it and heat it up until you get the desired consistency. You can then drain, salt and hang.
You could also add some starter before coagulation to develop more interesting aromas.
When you heat your milk to the temperature you describe, yoi rennet is probably all denatured (deactivated), although this microbial rennet seems more resistant to heat than animal rennet. So the coagulation needs to happened between the time when the milk get to a warm enough temperature and when it becomes inactivated by the heat. If you keep stearing in that period, you also impede curd formation and decrease the yield.
Thanks for the very helpful replies!
Here is the post-mortem:
I think the original failure to curdle was because the milk was already too hot when rennet was added. I always add rennet dissolved in cold water to cold milk, and heat slowly, but someone else was filling in for me and added rennet to hot milk.
The second add of rennet was also to hot milk.
Then vinegar was added, but I do not know how much, and I think at that point the milk was cold.
As I heated the milk to add the last dose of vinegar, the originally-added vinegar began to coagulate the milk at bottom of pot where it was hottest, so milk stuck to bottom and burned a bit. Once milk was very hot (about 190 F), I added more vinegar, and the rest of the milk rapidly flocculated as it should.
The tiny curds did blind the cheesecloth badly, so it is not draining well, but it's salted and hanging. It will be edible, or not.
Lessons: Add rennet to cold and heat slowly
If using vinegar, heat milk first!
It is funny that we had a process that worked reliably for years, but did not understand what was important and what was not, so when it got muddled I had no idea what had gone wrong or how to fix it.
THANKS AGAIN!
Ideally, you should first bring the milk to target temperature (30°C-35°C/86°F-95°F) add rennet, stir for 30sec-1min, let at this temperature until coagulated (30-60min), cut then heat slowly until you get the desired consistency. I think this would increase the yeild substantially. You could add a little bit of vinegar to increase rennet activity but it would be even better to pre ripen (30-60min) the milk with some starter.
For years, we made what I called, "Neolithic cheese" We had no refrigeration, and accumulated milk soured, curdled, we cut and cooked the curds, pressed and ate them. Depending on time-of-year, temperatures, humidity, etc., sometimes we got something a lot like Romano, sometimes milder.
These days season and temp still have an influence. When weather is hot, even refrigerator-stored milk is riper before we add rennet, and our favorite product, which we call "squeaky cheese", only appears in the cooler parts of the year. In humid seasons, the cheese stays moister (we no longer have room for a press) and gets "Limburgery" as it hangs, which only I will keep eating, 'though I do not prefer it.
Some day we may have time and facilities to make predictable cheese. 'Til then, as long as we can eat it, 'sokay.