It’s Monday afternoon. I’ve picked up my cheese cultures from Castle Cary, scrubbed down the kitchen (hygiene is paramount) and the cows’ milk is ready and waiting.
I haven’t sourced anything direct from a dairy farm yet and I’m not quite ready to try my hand with raw milk (it’s perfectly safe to make cheese from but you do need to be a little more careful). For now, I’m using Duchy Organic milk. It’s pasteurised but it hasn’t been homogenised – which smashes up the structure of the milk. It should work fine.
Typically, I decide to go off-piste from the get-go. I don’t want to make Camembert or Caerphilly again so I’m adapting Paul’s Camembert recipe and combining it with elements from the Camblu recipe that I found on the New England Cheese Making Supply Co. website (a useful resource but one that needs a little interpretation). Effectively, I’m making Cambozola.
Six litres of milk are added to the pan and I slowly heat it up on the hob. I take its pH – it’s 6.77, possibly slightly high but nothing to be overly concerned about. Temperature-wise, I’m aiming for somewhere between 30˚C and 32˚C and I reach 31.8˚C at exactly 4.00pm. I will soon learn that I really don’t want to start making cheese at this time of day…
A tiny amount (just 0.09g) of starter culture is added (I’m using Flora Danica). Then it has to rest for an hour before I can add the rennet (again, a tiny amount – 1.8ml). Another hour and a half or so and then I can test the curd. I’m worried that the curd has got to cold so I switch on the hob again. After twenty minutes I suddenly realise that if the curd has set then the hob will be cooking the curd at the bottom of the pan and doing nothing to the top. I switch off, wondering if I have already wrecked my first make.
Nothing to be done so I wait a little longer and, just shy of 7.00pm, I test the curd by making a small cut in the surface of the curd, insert my finger underneath the cut and lift. It falls away cleanly on either side. Game on.
The curds are cut into 2cm cubes, stirred and rested. The stirring and resting is repeated three times, allowing the whey to drain off from the curd. Then I spoon the curd into the moulds until they are about half-way. Another culture, Penicillium Roqueforti, is sprinkled over the surface and the moulds are filled to the top: this will introduce the blue to the cheese.
After an hour and a half, I turn the cheeses in the moulds (you flop them out into your hand, praying they don’t collapse or that you don’t drop them) and drop them back in. This is repeated after another couple of hours and I finally get to bed at a quarter to one.
