The Joys Of Things Which Ferment

For someone who can be very impatient, I have managed to pick up a number of cooking hobbies which require a lot of patience.  I've graduated from breads that only require one single hour rise to breads which take two or more days to craft from start to finish.  I've thrown myself into beer brewing, which takes a good four hours on the front end, a couple hours in the middle, and at least a month before the product comes to fruition.  It takes an extra month for the flavors to fully develop.  I've become pickled obsessed, which although can be sometimes enjoyed in as few as 24 hours, usually requires at least two weeks for the flavors to develop properly.  And so of course, I decided that I must start making my own cheese, which can take up to four whole months to do properly.  My first experiment?  Monterey Jack.

After doing a significant amount of research online and reading through the better part of Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll which my trusty Boy purchased, I ended up ordering a beginners kit that comes with the appropriate cultures and rennet from her company, the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.  It comes with recipes for about 8 or 9 different kinds of cheese, but the ingredients are flexible enough to make only your favorites (for example, I won't make the parmesan).  It also shows you how to do hard cheeses without the fancy presses that cost a ton of money.  Although there are ways to make hard cheeses using ingredients you can find at the grocery store (namely junket rennet and buttermilk or yogurt), I decided to do this the proper way since from what I've read, results can be mixed given unknowns about the cultures in the buttermilk or yogurt.  Plus, apparantly junket rennet is fairly weak and so isn't recommended for hard cheeses.

My first impressions of the beginners kit was that it was a little bit incomplete.  It didn't come with a top part of the cheese mold and suggests you use an appropriate sized plate.  I have square plates so they obviously don't fit into the round cheese mold.  I ended up cutting out something about the right size out of cardboard and putting it in a ziploc.  It also didn't come with the cheese wax, but warns you of that on the website so no huge ding there.  The instructions are quite truncated as compared to the book, for obvious reasons, but I'm glad I did some background reading so as to be able to easily fill in any gaps or questions.  All in all, the little guide did give a weath of information, from the kind of milk to use to how to wax your cheese.  Each component tells you where you need to store it (cultures in freezer, for example). 

One thing all resources told me was to get raw milk or the closest thing to raw milk as possible (that means, no ultrapasturized milk products, and if pasturized, you might have to add calcium choloride to get the cheese to firm up properly).  Well, it just so happens that raw milk is readily available at my Farmer's Market.  Okay, but what happens if I can't make it to the Farmer's Market?  Whole Foods to the rescue!  They stock a local Virginia dairy's whole organic creamline milk... it comes in the old school milk bottles for about $3, but there is a $2 bottle deposit.  This is actually cheaper than buying regular organic milk when you return the bottle.  But the bottles are also cool in and of themselves and I kinda wanna keep 'em.

Basically, making cheese requires a ton of patience and constant monitoring of temperature and stirring of curds.  It would probably take me 2 hours just to type out what I had to do.  Just know that this is easily a 5 to 6 hour project, requires vigilence, patience, and a good thermometer.  One day, maybe, if I ever need to waste a couple hours, I might actually blog out what exactly the process was.  Or you could just go buy the book and save me the time.  Hehe. 

Photo montage of the cheese making process:

Update July 21, 2010: Boy and I cut open the cheese.  It looks and tastes like a young monterey jack cheese and melts beautifully!