Making Cheese: English Farmhouse

This weekend I made English Farmhouse Cheese.  It is a semi-firm fresh cheese, made to be eaten with a couple of weeks of manufacture:

Here are the ingredients and equipment:  1 gallon of whole milk, rennet, mesophilic bacteria, measuring cup, cutting knife, molds, calcium chloride, thermometer, measuring spoon, and large pot.

This is my cheese making bible.  I will probably never get through every cheese in here - although like everything else, I am always convinced I may need "one more book...

First the milk gets heated - in this case to 90 F and then the bacteria is added.  Temperature is very important in cheese making with some bacteria (mesophilic) are used at  less than 100 F and others (Thermophilic) at above 100 F.  It all depends on what you are making.

After five minutes of rehydration the bacteria is stirred in.

Next rennet and calcium chloride is added.  Rennet is an enzyme (traditionally from calves' stomachs but now also from plants) that coagulates the milk while calcium chloride helps with firming up the curd. They are dissolved in a 1/4 cup of water:.

Now we wait for 75 minutes.  At the end of this time the bacteria has been at work turning lactose into cheese while the rennet is making things firm.  I have tilted the pot so you can see that it is no longer liquid:

Meanwhile our cutting knife, molds, and draining container have been sitting in a sterilization solution.  We will use them now:

I now perform a cut to see if there is a "clean break"  i.e. if the curds are sufficiently firm to cut.  In this case they are, but I could wait longer if I have to.

In this case we are good, so we continue by cutting all the curd, first left and right and then at a slant to break up everything.  This allows the whey to drain more quickly.

Now the fun begins!  Using a skimmer, I begin ladling curd into the molds, allowing the whey to drain off. 

Filled to the top:

And now we wait.  The weight of the curds will slowly press the whey (mostly water, but some protein) out of the curds. This is a picture of the whey flowing off of the cutting board the molds are on.

After a while we need to drain the whey and refill the molds with the rest of the curd.

More waiting.  These is about 6 hours in.  You can see the curd slowly reducing as the whey drains out and the curds knit together:

This morning (approximately 20 hours later):

Now one has to remove the cheese from the mold.  I will be honest:  for me, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish with this cheese.  I have not yet (after 3 years) gotten the touch.  The cheese on the right is how things should look; the cheese on the left is how things actually look:

(Worry not, the flavor is not affected by appearance!)

Final step: Salt, both for preservation and flavor:

And here is the finished product, ready for storage in the refrigerator (no aging for this one; it typically keeps for 2-3 weeks).  It is delightful with crackers or just by itself.

This cheese is a favorite to make both because everyone loves it and it is not that extensive in terms of time: total time (outside of waiting) is about 2 hours to prepare, stir, ladle, process, and finish.  It can easily be started in the morning as I did and managed throughout the day with other activities.  Additionally, I get close to a gallon of whey.  In the old days whey was actually a drink of its own, now it is usually disposed of or fed to livestock or dried and powdered for nutritional supplements.  I just drink mine.

I enjoy making cheese.  It may not always come out precisely right, but I have never had one that was completely inedible.