Havarti

Today was Havarti day.  Havarti is a Danish cheese, although I just think of it as a mild, easily meltable cheese.  Inoffensive, smells fine, tastes fine, whatever.  I chose Havarti today for a few reasons:  1) I'm somewhat impatient and it only has to age for a month. 2) The aging environment is one similar to what I already have set up for my mold-ripened soft cheeses ( 54* F, 90% humidity)  3) It doesn't require brining, which is not hard, but something I wasn't set up to do today.

First, the milk.  Our cow Perry(winkle) puts out about 4 gallons a day. Perry is a Jersey cow so she puts out a pretty high butterfat content.  I had it tested at a lab last year and she was about 6.25%.  The USDA says 3.25% is considered "whole" milk, for some perspective.

These are quart-sized jars.  I used 8 of them (4 gallons).

Next I heated the milk to 90* F.

Add the bacteria or cultures

Kind of looks like pop rocks.

You add cultures here to give the cheese flavor.  Think of it like this:  milk is sweet.  It's sweet because it is full of sugars.  You add bacteria to start converting the sugars into lactic acid, which essentially "sours" the milk.  This is the same thing as leaving out a cup of milk overnight.  The difference with adding  your own cultures is that you YOU choose what kind of cultures colonize in the milk and under what conditions.  And the BIG difference is this part:

  Rennet.  Animal rennet.  Enzymes from a baby cow's stomach.  Adding rennet  (this recipe called for 3/4 tsp. for 4 gallons of milk) speeds up the curdling process.  And in doing so, preserves some of the milk sugars from being eaten up by the cultures.  So effectively you get sweetened, but curdled milk.  That is what most cheese is all about, by the way.  You controlling the acidity and sweetness and moisture content of the cheese.  You could get the same process to happen just by leaving out the milk in warm temperatures, but that is gross.  Acidifying and gelling the milk in a controlled manner is what makes cheese tasty...of course you then have to age it, but that comes later.

Ok, so what is happening above?  I added the rennet to the milk and stirred it in.  What happens next is pretty cool, considering the very small amount of rennet that you add.   It is a little hard to see and imagine what is going on here, but think of the first picture as just 4 gallons of liquid milk.  And the last picture, think of it as 4 gallons of jello or custard.  The time that it took to get from liquid to the gel consistency I wanted was 31 minutes and 30 seconds.  The bowl, by the way, was for the method I use to get the right gel consistency.   The method is called "flocculation" and someone else can explain the science part of it better, but basically you float a bowl on the surface of the liquid milk immediately after stirring in the rennet.  And then you start to spin the bowl as it floats on the surface.  You keep spinning the bowl until all of the sudden (usually about 8-10 minutes later) the bowl freezes and it won't spin any more.  That is the flocculation point, the point that the milk has started to gel.  And then, based on how much you want that gel to retain liquid (how moist you want the cheese), you multiply the time it took to stop the bowl from spinning by a multiplier (in this case 3) and that is the total time you should rennet your cheese.  I'm not sure how this sounds to a non-cheesemaker, but this is a big deal.  It's a big deal because if you listen to a recipe book, they give you a specific time to let the rennet do it's work.  The problem is that each and every time you make cheese, the renneting time is different.  I'm not sure why, but it is.  And since renneting is what determines your final moisture content, if you want consistency, you have to ignore the times in the recipes.  The only accurate way to get the consistency in moisture that you want is to measure your flocculation point and use your multipliers...Hard cheeses like swiss have low floc multipliers (like 1.5 or 2).  Cheddars (and Havarti) call for a floc multiplier of 3-3.5.  And brie has a multiplier of 6.  So the renneting time on a soft cheese like brie can be an hour to two hours.  And think about it for a second.  The longer you let the gel set, the more moisture is retained in the curd.  So that is why brie is soft and runny, while swiss is hard and drier.  Get it?

Next...cut the curd and let some of that moisture (whey) out.  The recipe called for cutting the curd into 1/2 inch cubes, then stirring for 10 minutes to start releasing more whey.

After 10 minutes, you can see that the curds are smaller in size and have released more whey.

Now Havarti is known as a "washed-curd" cheese.  Here what you do is remove some of the whey by scooping it out and replacing it with fresh water.  In this case, you use 170*F water to bring up the overall temperature to about a 100*F.    This makes the cheese milder and sweeter, by taking away some of the lactic acid.  You then add some salt to the pot to provide flavor, but also to slow the acidifying process of the cultures.  I stupidly forgot to take pics of all this...sorry.  

  Drained the curds of the whey.  Looks like cottage cheese at this point.

Put the curds in the press...

...whey is draining.

Unwrap to flip the cheese and rewrap for more pressing...

Twenty minutes later, you can see the curds are starting to "knit" together to form a wheel of cheese.  I have this going for another 8 hours in the press.  And once I take it out tonight, I will post a pic of it.  The next step is to put it in a "ripening box", basically a tupperware bin inside a refrigerator that is set at 55*F.  This keeps a constant humidity of ~90%, which keeps the cheese from drying out and the temperature is an ideal temp for the cultures (remember those?) living within the cheese to slowly eat the milk sugars and convert them to lactic acid.  This is the aging process I mentioned earlier.  In a month or so, this cheese will be ready to eat.  And I can age it even longer if I want to let the cultures keep doing their thing.  I'll talk about aging in a different post.   But for now, realize that cheese is a living thing that you have to keep happy for it to grow into the food you want it to be.   Stay tuned for the final product...