First attempt at cheddar

Yesterday my dad and I made our first attempt at making a hard cheese. Hard cheese is more difficult than soft, you see, because it has to age for months afterward. That means you don't immediately see the evidence if you screwed up, and that if your equipment wasn't totally clean any contaminants can ruin it in the aging process. Got to be more careful when you make it.

For our very first try Dad and I elected to try what's called a stirred-curd cheddar. That's a way of making cheddar that is a little simpler than the traditional way, which must be really involved given how long this process took. We cooked the raw cow's milk in a double-boiler, a procedure we are still getting the hang of. Depending on the quantity of milk, the temperature rises at a different rate and has different amounts of carryover heating when after you turn the burner off. Cheese making involves enzymes and cultures that die and don't work if you heat them past certain temperatures. We mostly hit the marks we were supposed to, but during the curd-stirring step the carryover heated it almost ten degrees past where we wanted it, and there's really no way to cool off such a large quantity of liquid in short order, so we're worried we may have killed something important. Still, the milk seemed to form curds and set and mold the way it was supposed to, so maybe we're okay. Of course, it has to age for six months, so maybe we'll see the problems after that.

The making took a very long time, hours involving several temperature targets, long periods of constant stirring, and incremental increases in the pressure applied by a cheese press. The cheese is still in there now, requiring fifty pounds of pressure for a full twenty-four hours before being put aside to dry. You can see the whey draining out in the dish below into the sink. One neat thing is that we included cheese coloring to make it yellow cheddar, and though through most of the process it was very white, now that it's drying it's becoming more and more yellow.

I like the little engraving on the press, a little mouse in a chef's hat and apron holding a wheel of cheese.

We're thinking of making a second batch on Friday, once the press is free again. Just to see if we can do a better job of keeping the milk to temperature, in case the first batch doesn't come out.