Hello Frank and welcome from the other side of the pond. Here are he recipes I have used for the cheeses you mensioned hope it helps - Some are very old!
Lancashire cheese
Ingredients:
1 gallon of whole milk
½ pint of active buttermilk
4 oz. plain active yogurt ( I used Danon)
1 oz. kosher salt
Rennet
Procedure:
Bring milk up to 88°F or 31°C
Shake up the buttermilk and add it to the milk and stir vigorously.
Take some milk and mix well with the yougurt then add to the the pot.
Mix rennet per instructions add to the milk and stir well.
Cover and leave for 90 minutes at 88°F or 31°C until a clean break is achieved.
Once a clean break is achieved cut the curds into 1/4 inch cubes.
Gently slide lift the curds upwards so that they turn over, cutting any big ones that you find.
Leave the curds covered at 88°F or 31°C for 30 minutess.
After 30 minutes the curds should have sunk below the whey. Drain of the whey until it is just covering the curds and leave it sit for another 30 minutes stirring gently so they don' t matt together.
Put some cheese cloth into the colander and gently scoop the curds into the colander to drain.
Tie the corners and hang curds to drain for 30 minutes.
Press this for two hours at about 10 pounds pressure.
Unwrap your curds and break up into cherry sized pieces then add the salt.
Place the curd in your mould and press with 10 pounds of pressure for several days turning at least 4 times the first day.
After three days the cheese can be removed from the mould and aged or eaten fresh. I recommend a minimum of 3 months - 6 months is better!
missies a step edited .... sorry!
The above post was split off of this Intro Post (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,4656.0.html) requesting this recipe as I think it is worth it's own separate thread.
are you suppose to add the yogurt the same time you add the butter milk? You left that part out.
Thanks.
yes sorry missed a step! I fixed it!
Thanks DJD for clarifying that. This sounds interesting and I think I may give it a try. I was reading about it on wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_cheese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_cheese) ) and found it very interesting that they use to would use curd made in small batches over a period of several days.
Can you tell me if this is a creamy cheese or a crumbly cheese, like it talks about in wiki? im shooting for creamy.
It should be creamy not crumbly but you have to watch you temperatures and cooking closely. If the curds shrink to much it will be dry and crumbly. When you cook the curds don't go over 88°F! Even 90°F with dry the curds to much. Error on the low end of temperature for this cheese. 86 to 88°F is fine for this cheese no higher.
I think this is really going to be a really good cheese. I started it last week by making 2 different batches of curds on different days from different milkings so that I would have different curd PH levels when I combined the curds.
I took the cheese out of the mould after flipping under 10lbs of pressure for 3 days now. Now, the recipe doesn't really say if I should air dry now or what, just to age 3 - 6 months.
Question: Should I let it dry a day or two before moving to the cave and should I vacuum pack it when i move it?
Debi, how do you age the cheese? Wash the rind, wax, vac pack?
Thanks
I don't have access to buttermilk in Bulgaria, I presume I can use rennet instead?
No, one is for acidification, the other (rennet) for coagulation.
In Bulgarian, what you need is called Мътеницата or Бутаницата.
How do you know this stuff linuxboy...are you really a highly sophisticated AI or a walking dictionary?
LOL. No, I'm originally from Ukraine (still speak Russian and Ukrainian), and have many Slavic friends, so I happen to know all the various names for cheese and dairy-related things so I can translate and explain myself. I couldn't speak Bulgarian conversationally, but I could explain to someone how to make cheese in very bad Bulgarian. I figure that's more important, anyway :)
Quote from: Alex on October 05, 2010, 03:17:14 PM
Debi, how do you age the cheese? Wash the rind, wax, vac pack?
Thanks
Alex as with most of my cheeses after a brief 3 to 4 weeks of aging in the cave with a wash every few days I vac pac it. I am not a huge fan of this cheese - I tend to love the Italian cheeses but then I grew up with them in a predominately Italian neighborhood.
Thanks Linuxboy, the info in cyrilic is very handy and I am sourcing it now.
If you need thermophilic culture, look for yogurt. IIRC, it's called кисле мляко - "sour milk".
Hi DeejayDebbie,
I know this is an old thread, but I found it via Iezzo's recipe finder thread. Anyway, I'm wondering, would the mould you use for this 1 gallon make be a 4 inch mold? Just wondering about converting your 10 lbs to PSI so I can calculate the weight for my 6.25 inch.
- Jeff
as a sort of general rule of thumb .. 1 gallon of milk makes about 1 pound of cheese (more or less) so a 4 inch mold could be used.
Hello all, I beg to differ on the question of texture for lancashire cheese. I grew up on the Cheshire / Lancashire border and I remember Lancashire being a very clean white cheese with a distinct crumbly texture almost to the point of not being able to be sliced. Lancashire is crumbly. :-\
I agree with Cheshire Cat, whenever I've had some it's been somewhat crumbly.
CC's right. It's a very crumbly, tangy cheese, eaten quite young.
Well, then, what I'm making may not be a true Lancashire, but my family loves it!
Hi,
I believe the version that MrsKK (and I) have been making is a modified version, with the Lancashire make tweaked to produce a fast ripening moist version. It's probably sufficiently different that it could be called something else, but then the link is lost.
- Jeff
Yeah, the recipe currently circulating is really far removed from the traditional make. I personally wouldn't call it lancashire, but that's just me. Here is a link to the more traditional make (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,6275.msg44619.html#msg44619).
Well, that means that the five Lancashires I made (before I gave up on it) weren't fails after all, just true Lancashire. I never got anywhere near the results MrsKK and Sailor did from that recipe.
Quote from: george (MaryJ) on November 13, 2011, 11:16:08 AM
Well, that means that the five Lancashires I made (before I gave up on it) weren't fails after all, just true Lancashire. I never got anywhere near the results MrsKK and Sailor did from that recipe.
If you'd like some advice, I suggest starting a new thread with your make specifics, type of milk, culture, rennet, anything that may have differed from the recipe. Then maybe we can help you out with it. I hate for someone to not get it.
Quote from: MrsKK on November 13, 2011, 01:19:32 PM
If you'd like some advice, I suggest starting a new thread with your make specifics, type of milk, culture, rennet, anything that may have differed from the recipe. Then maybe we can help you out with it. I hate for someone to not get it.
No, it's okay. I originally glommed onto the Lancashire idea both because I was trying to cheat on cheddars (faster aging) and the fact that it was supposed to be creamy. This was late winter/early spring of this year. Since then, though, I've managed to absolutely NAIL my Havartis and Goudas, so that takes care of the creamy cheeses. YAY! And the cheddars I did at that time, while not exactly what I was trying for, came out well enough that I decided I will just jolly well have to be patient and wait for them to age. I learned from those and have a few in the cave that should be absolutely perfect come, oh, Memorial Day or so. :o
The "fails" got eaten anyway, though, so technically they're not fails, I guess. One of them came out rather interesting, got some serious b. linens all over it. It got grated and put over potatoes. 8)
I've an apology to make: it seems that there are three varieties of Lancashire. I only knew of the crumbly one. The British Cheese Board clears up the issue:
http://www.britishcheese.com/lancashire (http://www.britishcheese.com/lancashire)
Ahh, thanks fied! Looks like the one going round would be "creamy Lancashire", and although the make going round doesn't involve the mixing of curds from two days in the traditional way, at least the texture is appropriate. Tasty just gets aged, and it's Crumbly Lancashire is the one we're missing a recipe for (though they say it's made similar to Cheshire, so one could go with that I suppose).
- Jeff
If you want it crumbly, you just use a smaller floc multiplier (set for less time after rennet before cutting) and let the acidity build up a little more (lower pH). If you want a crumbly cheddar, you will salt and hoop around a pH of 5.4.
Thanks Sailor.
The current make notes that I've posted in some other threads use a floc of 3.5, so if one were to reduce that to say, 2.75 or 3, that would be the first change.
To build up the acidity, I would suggest increasing the amount of time during the cheddaring stage (after draining the whey, keeping the curd cake warm in the pot) to something like 2 hours, flipping and stacking the curds every 20 minutes or so.
The other possibility is to also increase the cooking time before draining the whey as well.
- Jeff
This thread is getting confusing! ??? So the recipe in 200 easy recipes does resemble "creamy Lancashire". If it's aged longer does it become "tasty"? That is the recipe I used and I thought that recipe peaked at 60-90 days. I'd hate to throw some in the back of my cave only to find out it does not age well past 90 days! I just tried mine today at 60 days and it's quite nice now.
Quote from: JeffHamm on November 14, 2011, 10:42:33 PMThe current make notes that I've posted in some other threads use a floc of 3.5, so if one were to reduce that to say, 2.75 or 3, that would be the first change. To build up the acidity, I would suggest increasing the amount of time during the cheddaring stage (after draining the whey, keeping the curd cake warm in the pot) to something like 2 hours, flipping and stacking the curds every 20 minutes or so. The other possibility is to also increase the cooking time before draining the whey as well.
I would not do a big jump on the floc so I would go with 3 for a drier cheddar. Learning to make THE cheese that you want is trial and error sometimes, and you don't want to change more than one variable at a time or you won't know what worked, or didn't work for you.
Acidity is going to be your biggest change factor for "crumbly" anyway. Cheddars are the one category of cheese that I won't make without a reliable pH meter. I have done enough cheddars now that I can tell by feel when a curd mass is approaching the correct pH range. The curds will start sticking together much more aggressively and become more difficult to mill or break apart. But I always use a meter to get more consistent results. Otherwise your finished quality will be all over the place. And it's not just the pH at salting/hooping or the pH of the finished cheese that counts. You should drain traditional cheddars at around 6.1, so you do NOT want to keep cooking to reach the desired salting pH. That will just make your curds drier and harder to meld in the hoop. Cheddar as long as it takes to reach your terminal pH. Depending on the cultures that you use, that will take more or less time, so this is a great example of why simple time based recipes don't give the best results.
I do 5 different English Cheddars - Cheshire, Derby, Gloucester, Lancashire and Wensleydale. I salt Cheshire at 5.4 and I salt Wensleydale at 6.0. The others are in between. The Cheshire is dry and crumby. The Wensleydale (which uses an Aromatic meso culture) is much sweeter, creamier, and easier to slice. I actually do a partial washed curd on the Wensleydale to reduce the acidity even more.
Over time, acidity is generally balanced out with aging and the pH actually goes back up. However there are a few hard cheeses that are traditionally eaten young and can benefit from some creative pH management. Caerphilly and Lancashire come to mind first. When eaten young, both of these cheeses are acidic and tart. My English customers love them that way, but many Americans do not. So you can control both the early and longterm outcomes by simply adjusting starter, draining sooner, washing the curds, and/or hooping at higher pH.
Thanks Sailor! That's some great info and tips. Eventually I'll have to get a pH meter. Getting there though, one step at a time.
- Jeff
Quote from: anutcanfly on November 15, 2011, 03:08:46 AM
This thread is getting confusing! ??? So the recipe in 200 easy recipes does resemble "creamy Lancashire". If it's aged longer does it become "tasty"? That is the recipe I used and I thought that recipe peaked at 60-90 days. I'd hate to throw some in the back of my cave only to find out it does not age well past 90 days! I just tried mine today at 60 days and it's quite nice now.
I had some that was just at 90 days, but didn't have the time to eat it all, so I vacuum sealed it and put it in my regular fridge. We just opened it back up again and the flavor is wonderful.