My evolving thoughts on cheese

I don't know if it is just me, but when I first started really thinking about how cheese is made, it seemed so daunting.  I would follow one of Ricki Carrol's (the self-annointed 'Cheese Queen) recipes and be overwhelmed by the feeling that if I couldn't exactly replicate the process (like being off a few degrees in temperature), I was doomed to screwing up the cheese and the final product would be inedible.

I thought that because, when after making my first hard cheese, a cheddar, and then moving on to tackle a new style like Gouda, I quickly noticed that the recipes for different cheeses were not all that different.  What I mean by different is that while there are all sorts of variables like milk temperature, cultures, flocculation times, and curd manipulation, the process or the steps involved are pretty much the same...Heat milk > add culture > add rennet > manipulate curd > press > age = cheese.  The variations in cheeses, of course, come from how much you heat the cheese, what kinds of culture you add, how long you rennet the milk, and the method in which you manipulate the curds.  For some reason I chose to draw the conclusion that making cheese is very technical and if certain targets were somehow missed, well then, I don't know what, but I failed at making that cheese.

Here's the conclusion I should have drawn...Follow the basic steps and you WILL get cheese.  Vary the variables I mentioned above and you will STILL get cheese.  It may not be the cheese you were aiming for, but it will still be cheese.  I've slowly been coming to this conclusion as I've tried to reconcile the very specific and technical steps called for in Carrol's recipes with the fact that a few hundred years ago in France or Holland, there is no way a cheesemaker was able to consistently heat their milk to the exact same temperature from make to make.  Or manipulate the curds in exactly the same fashion as the previous batch.  Consistency is something that today's modern cheesemakers can achieve, now that we have thermometers, immersion circulators, lab-segregated bacteria cultures, not to mention food stabilizers and additives.  But hundreds of years ago?  Can you imagine trying to heat a kettle of milk to exactly 90 degrees F, over a wood fire?  Or linearly increase the temperature of your cooking curds at a rate of 2 degrees over 5 minutes for 30 minutes? I can tell you that this is extremely hard on a stove top.

So the point I learned is that aiming for a style, such as a white mold ripened (brie, brillat savarin) or a washed curd (gouda, colby, swiss) or a cheddared cheese (cheshire, monterey jack) should be the goal.  I still follow the recipes in the "Cheese Queen's" book, but only as a general guide.  And when my temperatures or times are off a bit?  I take note (literally) and try and compare the finished products to see the variations.  Mold ripened cheeses that call for longer ripening times (meaning let the cultures ripen the milk before renneting) have more lactic acid in them and have a more pronounced earthy flavor.  Cheddared cheeses that have a shorter renneting time and/or more curd manipulation are drier than if you let the curd form longer and/or stir or heat them less.

Today I made what the recipe called a "coulommier."  Last week I made a "camembert".  Both are mold-ripened, soft cheeses, which age pretty quickly, so I will be able to taste them both in about a month.  I'm looking forward to seeing how they differ in the end, but I don't really care if they turn out the way one would expect them to turn out.  Instead, I will be looking to see if the camembert is earthier, since the ripening time was longer.  And I will be looking to see if the coulommier has more moisture, since I didn't cut the curds before ladling them.  In a month or so, I will post pics and compare and contrast the two 'in the same family' cheeses.