Crayon cheese tasting

Rummaging through my refrigerator this morning trying to find something interesting to go with my bread my eyes fell on the crayon cheese I made back in early May. It had been sitting in the back of the fridge and out of site ever since, the idea being that good cheese needs to age, a month at a minimum. Actually, make that two months and beyond, one month was merely the estimate how long it would take for the cheese to be any good at all.

Well, there it was, pink as on its first day, and definitely at least a month old. Of course I was curious how it had turned out beneath that pink paraffin shell. And not only that, I have actually designs on making another one. But only if this experiment was any good at all. Making cheese had proven time consuming after all, and before doing it again I would want some reassurance it would not be an effort wasted. So I decided it was time to put that cheese to the test.

Just cutting that cheese left me under the impression the cheese was very dry and not creamy at all. No big surprise here considering that I had made that cheese from half fat milk. Normal cheese is not only made from full fat milk, it often also has extra cream added. Also, the interior of the cheese was still as white as on the day that I had waxed it, not yellowish as I would have expected it. Most other hard cheeses are yellow mine was not. Why not? I do not know.

The next step after cutting a wedge off of my cheese was to peal the wax from it. I quickly noticed that using colored paraffin for cheese wax was less than an optimal solution. It is a solution as it did keep my cheese from spoiling. No nasties were growing on it and that was good. It did not smell rooten or spoiled and that was even better. But the paraffin shell was difficult to peel off. The main problem with it was that it was very brittle, breaking easily into tiny pieces as I tried to pull it off. It took quite a while to get most of the paraffin off the cheese, and many of the tiny pieces never came off at all and wound up as part of my meal instead.

And then, the cheese itself. It does have a little aroma but definitely not very much. Similar for the taste: It has taste but it is not strong at all. A little bit like a very mild cheddar. It goes well with my bread but then, any commercial cheese goes well with bred, too. So while my cheese is not bad I would definitely prefer it to be more assertive: With a stringer aroma, and definitely with a stronger taste.

I am hoping that both aroma and taste are a function of aging. Meaning that given more time ripening in the back of the fridge there will be more aroma and more taste. As to why my cheese remained white instead of turning more toward yellow I don't know. Neither do I care much: If I can get the aroma and the flavor right I won't care much what the color is, and after all, white is still a lot better than a lot of other colors I can think of. So I will assume the missing piece is extra aging. And I am even going to put it to a test, by making another, and then waiting longer before I eat it.

But before trying again I need some real cheese wax. While that crayon in the paraffin that I used was non toxic I still did not like it too much in my cheese. Finding real cheese wax may turn out to be somewhat of a challenge but it will definitely be worth it. At least that much I am sure about.

Quick takes

So much to do, so little time left to write. Therefore, just a quick summary of the latest happenings in the chaos kitchen:

• I dried some sourdough by spreading it with a knife on a plastic bag and then let it sit for a day. Then I collected the dried up pieces into a small Ziploc container and put them into the freezer. The idea is to defrost them in a month time and test whether the reconstituted sourdough will be any good.
• My latest batch of new bread consisted of two loaves each of 25% rye and 25% whole wheat bread. The whole wheat dough was of great consistency and easy to work with. The rye dough was rather wet and impossible to knead: It just gummed up my fingers. Surprisingly, all loaves came out rather good, even the rye bread that I could I could not knead and that I finally just left to mold itself into the bread pans.
• I tried myself at another rennet cheese. I am wondering whether I am setting the curds at a high enough temperature because mine are not as firm as they look in pictures. Will try setting at a higher temperature next time.
• My cheese press was a disaster this time, leaking cheese big time and forcing me to repack the curds repeatedly. Maybe it's because the curds were too soft. Even if they were I believe my design could bear some improvement. Still thinking about exactly how.
• Did another batch of yogurt, with full fat milk but without milk powder. The result was rather soft and I had made sure the incubation temperature was as high as possible. It might still be worth it to live with softer yogurt in the future it that means I can cut out milk powder as a necessary ingredient.
• Tried the first two bottles of my second batch of beer. Not sure what to think because it is rather different from the first batch. It's not bad I think (it still officially needs a few days of aging) but I would like to know what accounts for the marked difference of the two batches when the recipes were almost the same.

Which was about it. So back to work now ...

My pink cheese

It has been two weeks since I started making an attempt at my very own red waxed dream cheese. Since then, the pressed cheese had basically been sitting in my fridge and growing the rind that my Internet sources had instructed me to wait for. And for the last few days, I have positively been antsy about my cheese.

Part of the reason for my antsiness was that I was not sure how much longer to wait for the next step. Some areas had indeed developed a yellowish layer of dry crust which I supposed was the rind. Other areas, however, were still white and were not showing any desire to ever be anything but white. To complicate matters my cheese started to crack at the edges, in exactly the spots that had developed the thickest of the crust.

The short of it I decided it was time to move on to the next stage which meant --- waxing my cheese. Which obviously brought up one question that I had not given too much though before: Now what do I wax it with? Sure, there are plenty of places on the Internet that will gladly sell you cheese wax but I did not see myself sinking like $20 (once shipping and handling is figured in) to wax a single cheese, then possibly decide I have had enough of that and sit on a pile of unused cheese wax for the rest of my life.

The local Walmart offered paraffin for canning and other household uses, and candles. While the candles came in all sorts of colors (like fire engine red) I decided against it. After all, there was no telling what else might be in that wax and it could well be that the stuff that makes candles smell good could also make stomachs hurt. So the paraffin it was- it was much cheaper anyway.

It also was transparent, and I specifically wanted a red cheese. Luckily, the kids of one of my buddies was able to help me out, and the solution came in form of a bright red crayon, straight out of their art box. It was specifically non toxic. And if parents aren't worried about their kids inevitably eating those crayons, I wasn't going to worry about that crayon around my cheese. I was in business!

The actual waxing was easy enough: Heat the paraffin in a small (but wider than the cheese) pot and melt and stir the crayon in. Obviously, the mix has to be hot enough to be liquid but otherwise only hot enough. Some of that wax will likely splatter on skin at some point in the process and if it does, hot feels better than really hot. Once the wax was liquid and all mixed up I first dipped the top into the cheese, immediately pulled it out and let it dry. Then I turned the cheese in my hand and did the same with the bottom of the cheese. I repeated both top and bottom a few more times to build up a bigger layer of wax.

This left me with a narrow uncovered strip of cheese along the sides. I guess one solution would have been just to dip the sides, one section after another until I got around. I decided to use a paint brush (unused!) instead. It worked very well indeed though this was the point when I discovered you don't want your wax too hot. Anyway, my cheese soon had a solid hard layer of wax all around it. The only problem? Well, it wasn't red:

Obviously, that single red crayon had not quite had the effect I had been hoping for. I guess I could have kept dipping my cheese into the was to build up a bigger shell but it was obvious my cheese would never be fire engine red. So how would I fix that the next time? Well, one possible solution would be to throw more crayons at the problem. Though I was extremely hesitant of raiding the kids' art sets of what remaining red they might have in there. And I don't think you can buy red crayons without building a stock of blue, yellow, and other useless colors as well.

Or maybe I can score a lipstick from someone? I suppose there must be tons of them that are no longer fashionable on lips but would still look great on my cheese. And surely they are non toxic as well, or at least I really hope so. Food coloring might help as well though I am not sure if it dissolves in wax and can withstand the heat without breaking up.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I do want to first find out how this cheese works out before waxing any additional ones. And that I won't know for two more months if I am to believe my Internet sources. If I have the patience to wait that long that is ---

Toward real cheese

It has already been a few days since I made my first attempt at my dream cheese, that little wheel in red wax. There are no results yet because successful cheese takes about two months. Failing tends to go a lot faster- but while I suffered through a minor crisis already, I am still in the game. And before I forget the things I think I found out I better report. What follows is far from a complete recipe; rather, it's a collection of notes on this first attempt at a real cheese.

The initial steps are much like for rennet cheese: Start with  gallon of regular milk, let it get to room temperature, and add some starter. For the rennet cheese I used buttermilk, this time I used yogurt- mostly because it was older and needed to be used up. Let sit over night, then heat to 85°F and add 1/4 tablet of rennet dissolved in 1/4 cup of cold water. Let sit for another couple of hours after which the rennet should have gelled the milk into a curd. Then cut the curd into small cubes, just like for the rennet cheese.

Now the procedures get different. Rather than draining the whey off the curds immediately, slowly head the pot with curds and whey to 100°F while stirring almost constantly. That heating and stirring will take at least 15 minutes and should continue until the curds flakes have hardened and settled into pieces a like cottage cheese. Only then strain the content of the pot through a flour sack to get rid of the whey.

Following my instructions I added two teaspoons of salt next and worked it into the curds. The resulting mixture tasted rather salty but hey, I was just following instructions. Next I lined my cheese press with the flour sack and set up my cheapo cheese press. Over the next eight hours it was waiting and an occasional tightening of the clamp. I was surprised how little extra whey was draining but not overly concerned at that point.

When I removed the pressed cheese after eight hours it was way too soft and way too wet. Even a first timer like me could readily see that. Yet, I was still determined to stay with the program- which called for the cheese to be rubbed in salt. Except that cheese would not even stick together when I tried to rub. At this point it also occurred to me what must have happened: Little pieces of curd had clogged the pores in the flour sack almost immediately, and after that very little additional whey was able the drain from the cheese.

So far, so bad! This was obviously not going to work and my options were to give up or to improvise. I chose the second: I scooped the entire broken mess back into my cheese press, this time directly and without any lining. Not the cleanliest and most hygienic thing for sure but this was time for worry about bacteria. Besides with the cheese effectively double salted by now I doubted anything harmful to man would be able to live in there.

I pressed the cheese for another couple of hours and a lot more whey drained out. A little bit of the cheese managed to escape through the holes of the cheese press cylinder but this was really negligible. And when I removed the cheese for a second time from the press, it actually held together. I decided to forego the salt rubbing this time. The cheese would probably have held up but I figured the last it needed was any additional salt.

I just wrapped my cheese into a fresh flour sack, put the whole pack into a small bowl, and the bowl into the fridge. Since then, I have been checking it every day, replacing the wrap if it felt wet. They picture above shows my new pride as it looks now, after four days. I am waiting for the something like a rind to form which supposedly can take a week or two. Which is as well- after all, there is a lot of red wax I have to come up with before I can proceed to the next step!