A couple of other members have posted about using chocolate in or making cheese with chocolate flavoured milk so here I go!
Chocolate flavoured American Style Neufchâtel cheese based on the recipe posted here (https://cheeseforum.org/Recipes/Recipe_Neufchatel.htm) but with using chocolate flavoured cow's milk.
RECORDS
- Jan 10, 2010
- 2:00PM: Bought 1 US gallon/3.8 liters of "fresh" store bought pasteurized homogenized skim chocolate flavoured cow's milk for USD3.19 and placed on counter to warm to room temperature.
- 3:45PM: Poured milk into heavy bottomed stockpot on smallest ring of stove, measured temp at 50 °F/10 °C.
- 4:00PM: As milk pasteurized, to standardize, trickled and whisked in 1/4 teaspoon diluted CaCl2. Weighed ~0.35 grams of Danisco's Choozit Brand Mesophilic Starter Culture MM100 onto mini digital scale, tapped off onto top of milk, whisked in. Warmed with gas ring to accidentally too high ~29 °C/84 °F room temp.
- 4:20PM: Poured ~0.125 grams CHR Hansen Powdered Rennet onto mini digital scale, tapped off into 1/4 cup water, stirred to dilute, trickled onto milk and stirred for 1 minute. Covered and set aside for culture to ripen overnight.
- 6:00PM: Checked with finger, nice very very soft gelled curd, covered and set aside for culture to ripen overnight.
- Jan 11, 2010
- 4:20AM: Checked, 70 °F/21 °C, nice lactic acid curd forming (http://www.cheeseforum.org/Making/Coagulation.htm#Lactic_Acid_Coagulation), curd has shrunk away from walls of stockpot with layer of whey being expelled around circumference, top and probably bottom. Covered and set aside for culture to ripen further.
- 5:10PM: Measured temp at 71 °F/21.4 °C & pH of whey on uncalibrated meter at 4.05. Ladled curds into draining bag from DairyConnection.com and hung from camera tripod above same stockpot. Curd shattered easily and whey drainage was rapid where broke the soft curd.
- 9:20PM: Scraped de-wheyed curds off side of bag with spatula to allow moister curds to drain faster. Had taste off spatula, combination chocolate and cream cheese, but very sweet.
- Jan 12, 2010
- 5:30AM: Turned bag inside out into plastic container, pushed cheese down to fit, tasted, still chocolate flavoured cream cheese, still sweet but not quite as sweet. Placed lid on container and container in fridge to mature. Rinsed bag, no brown stain.
- 6:00PM: Took pictures of final product cold, very stiff-viscous, taste is chocolate - cream cheese, chocolate is not overpowered, sweet but not too sweet, nice desert cheese for on desert in cake or as part of cake icing.
- Feb 28, 2010
- 8:00AM: My family is not big on cheese and thus it's been mostly me eating this batch, and I'm not keen on chocolate milk, so I've been slow and it got lost at the back of the household kitchen fridge. Had some last weekend and was still good, went to use some today, white>blue mold starting on one quarter of surface! Understandable at 49 days age, remainder went down the drain.
NOTES
- Next time, place in draining bag after lactic curd has formed to get longer time draining for thicker cheese.
Pictures #2 . . .
Pictures #3 . . .
Im in suspense here......
Did you get a good clean break?
Looking forward to more photos
Hi driekus, now I remember, it was you proposing using chocolate in a different thread.
I only used a small amount of rennet as this is more a lactic acid coagulated cheese (http://www.cheeseforum.org/Making/Coagulation.htm) than a rennet coagulated, thus I was not expecting or wanted a clean break. The long time between adding mesophilic starter culture and hanging is to enable the lactic bacteria to multiply and the pH to drop to around 4.6-4.7 to get a curd after which I will break the curd (http://www.cheeseforum.org/Making/Curd%20-%20When%20To%20Cut.htm) by ladling into a draining bag (which will probably get stained brown :-[).
I'm not sure of the effect of having all that corn syrup and sugar will be, or the resultant cheese's taste given all those ingredients in the milk!
Okay, John, so maybe I will have to try this with raw cow's milk, just to give a comparison in results.
Give me until later in the week, though, as I worked night's this weekend. I think that I would just use cocoa powder and some sugar, though, rather than actual chocolate, which would have to be melted. I'll have to think about it a bit.
Not a bad idea -- growing up, I loved chocolate cream cheese (from Hickory Farms IIRC).
I have to admit that I'm a little grossed out by the idea. But you never know how tastes will come together, so maybe it will be good.
Hope it turns out well.
Strawberry and banana flavored milk next . . . all the childhood flavors ;)!
Seriously though, I should have checked the pH after 12 hours this morning as it may have been ready for the draining bag then. The outside of the curd was stiffer but the inside shattered easily when ladled and gave off whey rapidly as visible in the pictures above.
You go guy--banana splits!
Updated records & pictures above, taste after draining overnight was stronger choc flavored cream cheese, and slightly less sweet than before draining. Texture was slightly grainy (not obvious in picture above).
Kind of resembles soft icecream doesn't it?
Yep like ice cream or cream cheese ;D. Just added final two pictures, in the last one you can see the fine grainy texture, but texture in mouth is smooth.
Looks fabulous John. Sounds like the perfect party cheese.
That looks really neat! Chocolate canoli? Fruit dip? Bet that'd be great on strawberries! Chocolate cheese cake?
Updated records & pictures above again today at 49 days age!
I'm a slow eater of this and my family hasn't helped much so sadly still half left. I had some last weekend at 42 days age, was still good, went to have some on toast this morning, found mold on quarter of the cheese, white skum on free whey and white>blue fuzzy mold on some of cheese, so junked it.
That's too bad! I froze most of mine up, as I will probably only use it for baking up into cheesecake.
Yes, unfortunate, John--but those soft cheeses really need to be eaten within a week or two, tops. On another note--I love your new pic--tanning, are you?
Yep, Cheese Head Cow, and Canada won the Gold in both Womens and Mens Hockey in Olympics ;D.
My new avatar posted below as I'll probably change it again sometime ::).
Darn good overtime match too. Eatting all that Poutine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poutine) finally paid off. :o
Yep, sudden death overtime for Olympic gold is crazy, US could just have easily won it, American goaly was superb throughout the game, Crosby's winning goal was beautiful, he's the next Gretsky.
And yes I also noticed there were quite a few French Canadian sounding names on the Canadian Team!
Is it very tangy smelling? I made some, and it is draining now, but to me (and mind you, my nose is not very reliable) it smells like chocolate milk vomit. My 12 yr old smelled it and didn't say anything, except that it smelled like chocolate quick. And HE"S picky!!
I tasted some of the curd, and it's definatly chocolatly, but more like sour cream in flavor?
Im having a go with this, using 2L of 3% coco drink ,some CaCl2 just in case ,1 drop of veg rennet and a tiny pinch of probat 222 which is simmiler to aromatic b and flora danica in terms of composition.
Ha, so you're joining the crazy chocolate cream cheese clan, it's not that bad!
Been thinking of this. I'm not a purist per se, but I love the natural flavors of cheese and bacteria. I could easily see a chocolate aged gouda though. Someone did request it, but I still hesitate.
Its not really enjoyable by it self because of the acidic tang it has so I froze it with an intent of making a cake out of it,
Any good recipes?
Here (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,330.msg12029.html#msg12029) is a thread started by Tea with an excellent cheesecake recipe. If you wanted to, you could just use your chocolate Neuf, rather than having it be marbled.
Tried it, Apreantly my cheese is alot more moist then the cream cheese required so the base got sogy which is a shame since you really need that layer of texture in cheesecakes, also I had to bake it for 30 minutes longer then the recipe calls for untill it set.
Its a great cake ,the acidity of the lactic cheese really cuts through the sweetness giving it an interesting flavour and the texture is great ,very airy. I was expecting a dense NY cheese cake since there was no seperation of eggs ,beating of egg whites and folding it into the mixture like most airly cakes require.
I am very late to this thread but just wanted to point out a chocolate cheese that I began making a few months ago. Unlike yours John, mine is a bloomy rind and it has taken a lot of work to get right. On one hand I want the rind to bloom and give me this great aged texture. On the other hand, I cannot put any salt in it which works against the rind the cheese pathogen control practices so it was a tough balancing act.
At this point the rind is perfect, the texture is perfect (like a fluffy cheesecake). The flavor needs more work. It is intense chocolate but is almost feels like liquor-filled chocolate and the tang of the cheese acidity doesn't yet match the sweetness I want from the cheese. I have enlisted the help of a chocolatier (these guys are as crazy about what they do as we are apparently). As it turns out-the lipolysis of the butterfat also renders on the cocoa butter and the acidity of the cheese ferments the chocolate too fast. There is a fix for this (lots of bacterial swich-a-roos and change in temperature schedule and aging regiment) but I expect this to take at least 4-6 more batches until this is where I want it to be... Here she is:
IRF - Beautiful and technically interesting cheese.
Okay...if I try the "chocolate milk cheese" that originally started this topic, but started out with raw milk to which I've added my own chocolate flavoring (which would also include sugar), will there be any issues with "bad" bacteria growth? I'm wondering about the sugar added to the process. I've made plenty of lactic-type cheeses (sometimes adding just a touch of rennet depending on the circumstances) with raw milk, but never one with additional ingredients and sugar being added in.
I'm hoping this will work because this sounds SOOOOO GOOOOD!!!!
Sue here's one thread (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,7200.0.html) on adding sugar when making Cream Cheese and here's one (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,7200.0.html) on using sugar when making yogurt.
Wow that is awesome, you could make a hit cheese and sell the formula for milions :)
(or get a milion companies trying to clone your cheese).
You got to bring one of thos and let me in on a trio sit down (or maybe a quatro,Alex's wife...)
Wine and bread (and cheese if you dare...) is on me.
Sailor -thanks! It was (and still is) difficult to make. The goal is to technically make it a flawless process.
John - yes, the sugar is only half the issue. You need to use bacterium and mold that do not prefer glucose to lactose so that they won't attack the sugar in the chocolate while not affecting the cheese properly. The other half of the issue is well... lack of salt. Obviously I can't salt this cheese if I want it to be a rich sweet desert and that affects everything, from the paste texture and pH levels to maturation and phage control, to the fact that some bacterium is apparently chocoholic and really tries to ferment the chocolate... I still have about 8-9 different experimental batches in the pipeline to test different cultures and techniques and find the best practice but this one is difficult. I got the texture and aroma quite right. The rind can use slight adjustment and I think I have a solution (I have to test it and see if it works). The flavor still needs work because the ripening bacteria does some lipolysis to the chocolate. I am switching ripening cultures and chocolate types to find-tune it until I get the right combo. This could take a long time and I have to stress that it's not cheap when a quality chocolate is involved (and unfortunately, just as we don't buy crappy milk to use for cheesemaking, same rule goes for chocolates. Hershey's is not going to do it).
Tomer -you bet! Have you spoken to Alex lately? Haven't seen him on the forum for a while but I hear he is teaching cheesemaking courses. I've had his cheese and his wife's bread in a previous visit to Israel. Good stuff! It's funny how you, him and my parents home where I stay when I go to Israel are all minutes from one another...
Nice to finally see that cheese, Iratherfly, I remember you mentioning it some many months ago. What a concept!
"It's funny how you, him and my parents home where I stay when I go to Israel are all minutes from one another..."
Dont you know? Haifa is the cullinery city of israel, people come to live here simply for the food.
Otherwise I have no idea why they stay. :P
Thanks smilingcalico!
Tomer, you are too much :) Haifa is closer the the Galilee so it makes sense. I guess it's Israel's version of Lyon. Only foodies know that it's the culinary capital of France, not Paris. (Sorry, I just couldn't compare Paris to Tel Aviv, that's like comparing a painter to a software engineer)
Paris is wonderful , telaviv is just mayham and alot of filth.
so... im not a fan of it far too noisy for my taste, I'm a country guy at heart.
Gone settle in the galile with some goats,a few cows and a dog sometime in my future.
Im starting school again to get a degree in mech. engineering. so its gone be a minimum of 4 years.
IMO with the whole thing happening with tnuva and the big dairy companies people are DYING for localy made cheeses and will pay an extra ,just not to serve the giant evils.
I wouldn't go that hard on Tel Aviv. New York is dirty and mayhem, Tel Aviv has amazing restaurant, interesting people, modern architecture (and don't forget it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its Bauhaus architecture) and very progressive infrastructure. Lots of art, beach life, technology startup concentration that is only secondary to Silicon Valley and very diverse population, including peaceful living of Arabs and Jews together in Jaffa. The metropolitan area has population larger than Frankfurt, Budapest, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Munich, Pittsburgh, Vienna, Portland, Denver, Lyon, or Vancouver I wouldn't knock it down.
I agree about the state of Israeli big-dairy. I think that in 10-year's time Israel would go through the same cheese revolution as its wine industry went through about 15 years ago. It has the perfect conditions.