How do you do that accurately? I use a Weck electric canner but the thermostat dial doesn't seem to be in synch with the temp reading via digital thermometer. On Margaret Morris' video, she uses a hot plate to regulate her water bath temp. My stove is gas. I'm thinking I should invest in a thick bottom pot to start with but what's the best way for regulating your temps? ??? I'm afraid to even start making chessdar until I can handle that.
Temperature control is one of the toughest (yet simplest) things that you need to master.
Some here use Warming vats, other use stovetops burners.
Others, like me, use double boiler approaches.
Whatever you use, you should practice with water (although not quite the same.....) to get a feel for it.
For me, I suspend a pot of milk in a pot, in a vat of hot water. I then apply heat to the water bath, and its the bath that heats the milk. This applies very even heating. I can raise or lower the pot of cheesemilk into the vat of hot water, depending on how fast or slow i need to heat the milk. The deeper into the vat of hot water, the more surface area is exposed for more or less thermal transfer.
With this, I am able to finely control my heat to the extent that I can differentiate between a 2deg/5min or 3 deg/5min temperature changes using this method.
Admittedly this is very low tech approach, as it means I watch a couple of thermometers, and maintain control over how much heat I am appling to the bathwater, and then decide how deep the cheesemilk pot needs to be raised or lowered into that vat. Doing this I kinda feel like that circus performer that keeps all those spinning plates going on those little poles.......
But this works for me. There are other methods out there and certainly there are more automated ways to do this...
Thanks Wayne. That gives me more to think about with with my current set-up.
wow... Just a couple of months ago, when I first heated up a cup of milk and added some lime juice to coagulate it - as a demonstration... "Hey, this is simple!"....
Then when I got Ricki Carroll's book I thought all the recipes looked the same.
But I'm learning. It still is amazing to me that each little detail is a variable that changes what the cheese will be. After nearly 50 years of cooking, several of those year professionally, I thought I knew about cooking, but cheese is a whole new world.
I very much appreciate threads like this, that help me learn the importance of things that I used to think unimportant.
So.... what kind of difference would happen to a cheese if the rate of heat increase is different? For instance, would the cheese really be different if it were raised 2deg/5min vs. 3 deg/5min?
mosborn, it is culture selection/quantity, curd size/flocculation, and milk that affect cheese styles more than the heat schedule.
Heating serves two primary functions. One, it helps the curds to expel whey faster (stirring also helps here). Two, it helps the bacteria to grow faster and produce more acid than they would at the lower temps. That's why the temp targets are different for meso vs thermo. In both cases, you usually heat to close to the max threshold of the bacteria. The heating times, say 45 mins, are there as a guide for when the curds are ready to be pressed provided that you used the exact same rennet strength, curd size, and milk as the person who created the recipe. In reality the heat time required can vary, and the end goal should be the right curd texture at the right acidity for the cheese style.
With that in mind, there is a big reason why heating is done gradually vs quickly, and why it is uniform (for most cheeses) as opposed to slow at first and faster later or vice versa. It is because with a typical 3/8" curd size, if you heat too quickly, or have heat pockets at the bottom because you don't stir, then the outer layer of the curd piece loses moisture faster than the inside of the curd. This acts as a casing, making it harder for the inside of the curd to lose its moisture. The end result of this retained moisture is not really a more moist cheese, but rather pockets of whey in the cheese. That is, the water is not uniformly distributed. More moisture leads to faster proteolysis and higher acid, because there's lactose in that trapped whey. And those lead to texture and flavor/aroma defects.
To answer your question more directly, if you raised it 3 degrees over 5 mins for a thermo cheese, that's fine. If you raised it for a meso cheese, you would hit your target temp too quickly and possibly trap more moisture in the curd than you wanted. Or you will develop acidity too quickly because you give the bacteria a better environment, and then by the time you drain the whey, your acidification curve will be too steep, say 6.0 at whey drain. This would mean you'd need to work quickly to get the cheese salted or brined, depending on style, by the time the cheese hit 5.5. By that time, the whey needs to drain, and the curds need to knit. Pretty hard to do.
Conversely, say you tried to control that acidity by raising temp quickly, but not so fast as to form a casein shell, and used less culture to begin with so that the acidification curve was slower. In this case, the cheese would take too long to make, and this may expose it to contamination because pathogens or bad bacteria would have a longer time to get a foothold in the cheese with the more favorable pH conditions.
To summarize. If you heat too fast overall with a constant pace, you hit final temp too quickly, possibly causing too high acidity, but not enough whey expulsion. If you heat slowly at first, then increase heat, there will be too much water retention, and you will need to stir it longer to get the curds right (this depends on the difference in rates between early slow and later fast, I am assuming extreme examples). And if you heat it too quickly at first, then slow down, it will likely form a casein shell, causing, again, too high of a water retention.
Heating properly has to do more with avoiding cheese defects than making a completely different style of cheese. Cheese styles are formed more by culture, curd size/flocculation, and process combined with affinage.
Quote from: RadioFlyer on November 25, 2009, 07:59:01 PM
I'm thinking I should invest in a thick bottom pot to start with but what's the best way for regulating your temps? ???
As Wayne said, try to apply indirect heat and to as large a surface area as possible. One idea is to fill the kitchen sink with hot water and put the milk in there. Then boil water in a kettle and if the temp increase isn't fast enough, add some boiling water. You don't really need to use a range, unless it's at the very lowest setting.
Of the faults I mentioned, it's better to heat more slowly at first, then try to hit the temps by the end by raising the heat, than it is to heat quickly at first, and turn the heat off and maintain the temp until the curds are right.
Quote from: linuxboy on November 26, 2009, 01:10:19 AM
Quote from: RadioFlyer on November 25, 2009, 07:59:01 PM
I'm thinking I should invest in a thick bottom pot to start with but what's the best way for regulating your temps? ???
As Wayne said, try to apply indirect heat and to as large a surface area as possible. One idea is to fill the kitchen sink with hot water and put the milk in there. Then boil water in a kettle and if the temp increase isn't fast enough, add some boiling water. You don't really need to use a range, unless it's at the very lowest setting.
Of the faults I mentioned, it's better to heat more slowly at first, then try to hit the temps by the end by raising the heat, than it is to heat quickly at first, and turn the heat off and maintain the temp until the curds are right.
I would suggest practicing. more than once. with water. Its way cheaper than milk.
Prof. Linuxboy: That was a nice post. It was very very nice. 'splained things well.
Wayne wrote: "Prof. Linuxboy: That was a nice post. It was very very nice. 'splained things well."
Boy, I'll say. Thanks -- Many thanks. I think that will save me from some bad cheeses I would have made if I hadn't read that.
Ditto what mosborn said. Great info, thank you!
My gosh it seems like one almost needs to be a rocket surgeon to understand all the technical aspects of this science. I can't even make cottage cheese right yet! I think I got here just in time. At least my Feta turned out good.
Might I suggest using a double pot in a sink and regulating the temperature by using tap water? For theromphilic cheeses you may have to bump up your hot water heater or keep a tea pot of hot water on the stove but it's fairly easy to control temperature that way. It's even eaier if you have a double sink then one pot will do.
Another consideration is that the outside pot of a double broiler doesn't have to be metal if you are bringing in hot water from a faucet (120 degrees) or another pot as Linuxboy suggested. The final temp on the milk for a lot of recipes never goes above 104 F so you don't have to worry about plastic melting. I say this because sometimes when you are getting started it is easier to buy a plastic tub to experiment with rather than investing in a costly stainless steel setup.
As far as the complexity factor, just keep reading the details over and over and eventually it all starts coming together. I have read and reread so many posts on here and still have to check back when I am cooking sometimes. Keep at it.
My first double boiler.
Here. (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,93.msg2407.html#msg2407)
To quote linuxboy: .... it is culture selection/quantity, curd size/flocculation, and milk that affect cheese styles more than the heat schedule.
Heating serves two primary functions. One, it helps the curds to expel whey faster (stirring also helps here). Two, it helps the bacteria to grow faster and produce more acid than they would at the lower temps. That's why the temp targets are different for meso vs thermo. In both cases, you usually heat to close to the max threshold of the bacteria. The heating times, say 45 mins,...****
I just want to say how much I appreciate this post. I am already familiar with bacteria of the soil/water (nitrosomonas/nitrobacters) type from keeping saltwater aquariums...your info on the temps and their tolerances have greatly improved the way i 'see' this in my mind, and will impact how I start on this new highway. TY once again, smart, smart one :)
Alynxia
P.S. : I would ask, if these bacteria, not unlike nitrosomonas and nitrobacters, are 'eating'...'expelling' the whey as a byproduct? Is this what is happening with the cheese/curd formations? I kind of know the answer, but think that you explaining would help me become more enlightened in my mind as to their true nature. Hope this question doesn't sound too strange, lol
Quote from: Cheddarhead on January 07, 2010, 02:00:27 AM
P.S. : I would ask, if these bacteria, not unlike nitrosomonas and nitrobacters, are 'eating'...'expelling' the whey as a byproduct? Is this what is happening with the cheese/curd formations? I kind of know the answer, but think that you explaining would help me become more enlightened in my mind as to their true nature. Hope this question doesn't sound too strange, lol
Hi Alynxia,
Lactic bacteria are a bit more banal than the more exotic chemoautotrophs. It's your classic metabolysis here... pyruvate to lactic acid (for the homofermentive) and then further down to the CO2, acetates, etc (for the heterofermentive).
Whey production is a mechanical situation. Micelle matrix forms via casein cleaving (hydrophilic removal, leading to hydrophobic bonding), traps water and solids, then heat, time, and stirring makes the matrix let go of the water via syneresis.