I've Become a Homemade Yogurt Machine

Yogurt has been the latest frontier in my dairy kitchen. Let my first yogurt attempt be a lesson for us on what being a corner-cutting, lazy pile will get you. What should have been the most simple of my first four attempted cheese recipes went straight into the garbage on the first batch. There's not much to making yogurt. Just four basic steps: heat the milk, cool the milk, inoculate, and incubate.

A successful batch on my second attempt

You heat your milk to allow the protein to break down to the point where the yogurt cultures can do their work. This is called denaturing the protein, which occurs once the milk reaches 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit. As the milk heats on a high burner setting, continue to stir so it doesn't scorch. As soon as you hit the temperature, you immediately start to cool the milk to 110-115 degrees Fahrenheit. Usually I accomplish this step by taking the 180-degree pot and setting it in an ice bath I've prepared in my sink. 

Now, inoculate! Once the milk has cooled, add the starter cultures. You could buy a packet of direct set cultures and add it to the pot as you would with any other cheese recipe. Cheaper yet, because finished yogurt is full of live and active bacteria cultures (that is, after all, often its selling point, see Activia commercials), it can act as its own starter. So simply adding existing yogurt to the milk would work as well. The cultures in the old yogurt will start eating the lactose in the milk to create a new batch. Yogurt cannibalism, if you will.

(Note: many store-bought yogurt brands have killed off the live cultures by heating after incubation to improve shelf-life or control flavor. Yogurt without live/active cultures do not contain any active bacteria that will incubate a new batch, and therefore will not work. Make sure you read the labels.).

The appropriate ratio is usually two to four tablespoons of existing yogurt per half gallon of milk in your pot. The correct amount may vary depending on the acidity and active culture levels in your existing yogurt. You may need to experiment if your first attempt doesn't set. Also, as you continue to make new batches with the previous generation of yogurt, the bacteria may become less active. Generally after eight or so successive batches, the yogurt-on-yogurt starter culture method stops working. At that point, you'll need to start over with a direct set culture packet or buy some fresh live culture yogurt from the store to start the culture strain over. 

Stir the cultures into the milk, and let it incubate around 100-115 degrees Fahrenheit for anywhere between 5 to 12 hours. You probably won't start to see the milk setting until at least four hours after adding starter. For this step, I set the pot in a double boiler on the stove at the lowest burner setting for a few hours while the temperature levels out. Then just before going to bed, I turn the burner off. The yogurt will hover near the incubation temperature for a while and cool overnight.

The overnight incubation gives me a slightly thicker yogurt. Also, if most of you out there are normal people with a job who start most of your cooking in the evening, you'll likely need to let it incubate overnight versus sitting up with your incubating yogurt baby. 

On my first try, I successfully achieved the denaturing and cooling step. Then, things got ugly. I knew a double boiler system would likely be the best way to control the temperature. Some people use a fancy thermos-type contraption called a Yogotherm to stabilize the temperature. If you're not using more than two quarts of milk at a time, this would work for you. If you're making big batches, or like me are just too cheap to spend forty bucks, then a double boiler system will work just fine. It only requires a couple more trips to the stove to monitor your thermometer. As you might imagine, just leaving the pot on the stove without a double boiler and  without checking the temperature is not a good way to go. Emptying soup from my larger pot into tupperware, cleaning it out, and using it as a double boiler seemed like too much effort. So I skipped that step. Unfortunately even the lowest setting on my burner turned my pot of milk into a really gross creme brulee. It was stupid and lazy on my part. But I learned and kept trying. 

Double boiler. I learned my lesson.

My second attempt was a success. I used a double boiler, kept it around 105-110 for four hours, turned the burner off and let it set more overnight. On my successive attempts, I used 2% milk. We eat a lot of yogurt, and I need to save some daily fat allotment for all the ice cream, cheese, and steak. I wasn't sure if the low fat milk would set, but it worked just fine. The yield was lower and the finished product was runnier. I like thicker yogurt so I simply drained the yogurt for a couple hours in a cheese cloth (a finely knit strainer over a bowl would work too). Draining the yogurt also smooths out the texture and flavor. Adding dry milk powder or cream, I'm told, will also thicken your final product. After draining, the 2% milk made an equally creamy and rich, but healthier, yogurt. I suppose skim milk would work too with some draining...but why? Unless I develop a heart condition, I'd like to keep my milky-water experiences to a minimum...like when I'm drinking tap water in Flint, Michigan. 

If a film develops after incubation,
simply skim it off before transferring
to a storage container.

Different recipes will give you different temperature ranges for each step. Generally they are all within 5 to 10 degrees of the ranges I use. Other than the temperature needed to denature the protein, which really does need to be at least 180, the other steps will simply affect the texture and flavor of the yogurt. If you incubate at higher temperatures, the yogurt will get thicker and tangier. Lower temperatures will give you a runnier yogurt with less tang. A longer incubation time will also create a tangier yogurt. Instead of leaving the yogurt out overnight, you could put it in the fridge as soon as it sets to cut incubation time (generally around the four to five-hour mark).  

After my initial failure, I've made four new batches of yogurt. Sure it takes some time for a finished product, but making your own yogurt at home is cheaper than buying the same amount in the store. Plus you get some Oregon Trail-style street cred. It's about as old-timey sounding as churning your own butter. 

Love & Cheese

If you're like me, then Valentine's Day is an excuse to encourage your inner glutton with an indulgent, yet guilt-free, meal. You know, like President's Day, Labor Day, Arbor Day, Remembrance Day...Guy Fawkes Day? Okay, so if you're really like me, you don't need an excuse for a truly memorable food experience -- be it a fresh, greasy one-of-a-kind burger or an innovative multi-course meal. In fact, most of you probably don't find much romance in bloating, tight pants, and pushing yourself to the brink of eating stamina. For me, love is a judgment-free belly rub.

On Valentine's Day, however, romance truly is universally expressed in indulgence. Elaborate flowers, jewelry, an expensive dinner, chocolates -- each plays its part as an aphrodisiac. A means to your evening's happy end. Now you can add cheese into the love mix. Just ask the Italian women who ate Islay Dunlop cheese. Aphrodisiac qualities from phenylethylamine are even more potent in cheese than chocolate. Chemically the compound affects brain stems of cheese fiends and non-fiends, the fatties and the restrained all the same. It's not just me this time. Cheese is love. Science says so.

Maybe a big block of blue cheese doesn't scream allure, especially if you're a cheese-hater. Yet, for those with a stronger sense of culinary adventure and tolerance for your date's milk-breath and mild flatulence, nothing says I love you like a good lust-worthy cheese course.

Cheese is usually best suited for a dessert course, or immediately following or preceding a more traditional dessert course. Cheese and chocolate are also an ideal pairing (perhaps with a sweeter firm Alpine cheese or a nutty sheep cheese like Manchego), and can be accompanied by a good red wine. If you're really adventurous, try a stronger stand-alone course. Get a really good blue cheese for a match made in heaven with Sauternes, a French dessert wine available in mid-range quality at about $40 a bottle. Add some honey and dried figs into the flavor experience--both also believed to have aphrodisiac qualities. And thank your taste buds for existing. Rogue River makes some of my favorite blue cheese. There is also an Italian blue cheese washed in a dessert wine called Basajo. If you can find it, then paired with a sweet wine, honey, fig combo, it is one of the best desserts I've ever had. There is a French blue cheese that is washed in Sauternes that would also be an ideal fit.

Sure, I have a personal and peculiar love affair with cheese. It was, after all, last Valentine's Day weekend, encouraged by my real life human love, that I visited Connecticut for my first ever cheesemaking experience. And it has been my motto since college that "cheese is my first love; bacon is my mistress."  Still, the chemical power and creative potential of cheese and other foods like it is truly universal. Even if you're single, with a group of friends, or a general hater of the holiday of love with some principled vendetta against Hallmark, recognize this day as an opportunity to experience and experiment with the joy and pleasure of food and flavors. Cheese is there for you for this purpose. Just like it has always been there for me.

I'm in Ur Kitchin, Makin Ur Curdz: Super Bowl Edition

Pizza and football!!

Mozzarella holds a lofty position shared by very few of its colleagues in the cheese pantheon. It is a cheese even cheese-haters will admit to liking. It exists in a realm similar to the cheese ambassador role to which I previously appointed cheddar. Unlike cheddar, which can excel to great heights of flavor intensity, mozzarella is safer, tiptoeing over your taste buds with its soothing creaminess. When I was working the farmers markets, one out of five people would compare a sample to cheddar or ask if I had any cheddar. ("Do you have any cheddar?" was the second most annoying question about the product, runner-up to "Is that soap?".) The second most requested cheese was mozzarella to accompany the fresh herbs and vegetables people had purchased at the market. Bottom line: both are examples of cheese that are well-liked and equally ubiquitous. Cheddar can make a good hamburger great. But Mozzarella is often needed, not just desired. What's a caprese salad without mozzarella? Who wants of a slice of pizza without cheese (unless you're on a diet and you hate freedom)?  Sure, mozzarella is a relatively bland cheese, but it serves a host of delicious purposes. More importantly for me, it's really fun to make.

On my second full day at Brazos Valley Cheese, I caught wind that there were many pounds of mozzarella waiting to be stretched. I kept eyeing the buckets of milled cheese, salted and ready to be formed into smooth mozzarella. I had never played with mozzarella before,--yes, it's actually playing, like a child set loose on a giant ball of Gak--so I wanted to make sure I didn't miss out on the action. Finally, an hour before I leave the fun started. The cheese curd was made the previous day. The next day it is milled and salted. As with cheddar, milling the mozzarella is slicing larger blocks of cheese into smaller pieces, and mixing those smaller pieces with salt. At this point, you could just eat the salted cheese curds plain. To make mozzarella those curds need to be melted into one giant mass and stretched. Hot water, near 185 degrees Fahrenheit, poured into trays of curd enables the melting and stretching. With rubber gloves to protect our hands from the scalding heat, we start mashing and kneading the curd pieces together in the trays. The flowing steam and physical exertion brought back memories from the summer at Cato Corner. Back then, my my only frame of reference was the serious cheese work-out of stirring a 120-degree vat of nearly 4000lbs of curds and whey. Cheesemaking has gotten progressively less sweaty.

As we knead, we watch the pliability of the curd. The water may loose too much heat before the mozzarella is ready to stretch. For this batch we drained the trays and filled them with a new batch of hot water twice. On the second attempt, the curds began to really knit together and form an elastic mass. The cheese is folded over again and again until the curds have sufficiently melted together and are no longer individual lumps. At this point, the cheese has enough elasticity to stretch repeatedly like taffy until it becomes smooth and shiny. The entire blob can molded into one giant block; broken off into smaller pieces to stretch and twist into braids; ripped apart and rolled into balls; or molded for any purpose or shape you desire. If you are making something like a ball or braid, then once you from the shape, it is immediately dumped in cold water to ensure it holds the shape.

My hooped and drained grainy mess.
This is NOT what the
curd should look like. 

My first foray into mozzarella was a good lesson on what how the cheese should behave and look. So I was ready to try it on my own in the kitchen. On Super Bowl Sunday, Tad and I had grand plans to make homemade pizza with our own homemade dough, sauce, and mozzarella. The cheese was my assignment, but my kitchen variety would be slightly different from the style I had made at work.

I was making the quicker homemade version with citric acid to acidify the milk instead of cultures. The entire process should be under an hour versus the two-day process I described above. Acidification is the key to the elasticity in the stretch phase, and thus the smooth texture. The two-day version uses only cultures without any citric acid; the curd acidifies for a few hours until the end of the work day and is refrigerated overnight so it can be milled, salted, and stretched the next day. I have also seen a citric acid and culture combination that would give you the benefit of a quicker version, but with the flavor from the cultures.

Looking better and ready to stretch

I started with my store-bought whole milk, heated it, and added the citric acid and rennet. I also added lipase, an enzyme that provides a stronger flavor, especially in Italian cheese, but is destroyed during pasteurization. I hoped this would help add some complexity that would be missing due to the quality of the milk and the absence of a true starter culture. Unfortunately, several things seemed like they were going wrong. One, I didn't read the instructions on my lipase powder and failed to add it correctly or at the correct moment. I have no idea what that actually did. At the very least, it was ineffective because the mozzarella just tasted like cooked milk. Second, likely because of the quality of the milk, the curd did not form as well as it should have. It was too grainy and fragile. Adding calcium chloride may have helped form a firmer curd with the milk I was using. Next time.

Stretching under its weight.
A better curd would have
made a more elastic stretch.

This time, however, I was afraid the cheese was too grainy to knit together and stretch. Despite my insistence that we pick up some "back-up" mozzarella at the store in the event of a mozzarella-fail on my part, Tad refused to do so--I assume to prove a point about confidence. There would be no cheese-less, freedom-hating pizza under my roof! So I plodded ahead.

Oh hey! That actually looks like
mozzarella!

I assumed the best way to stretch the curd and get the right texture would be to heat water or whey to 180 degrees on the stove and immerse the drained curd in a bowl. An alternate method was provided in the recipe that allowed for a quicker stretch by using the microwave. I needed to see if I could salvage my curd as quickly as possible. I opted for the microwave method. I threw my hooped and drained curd into a bowl, microwaved for 30 seconds, and it was almost immediately ready to stretch. The grainy consistency was, thankfully, melting together nicely into a smooth, elastic mass that seemed readily identifiable as mozzarella. I repeated the microwave step one more time and was able to form a ball. I set the balls in a cold salt brine, which I had opted for instead of salting the curd directly. I assumed the pizza would have enough salt and I wanted the milder flavor I hoped the brine would achieve. It may have been a little too mild, highlighting the boring milkiness of the flavor. Next time I would try to remedy the taste by salting the curd and experimenting with starter culture.

It appeared that a crisis was averted. Still, I wasn't completely satisfied. The flavor was uninspired. Also, despite not being grainy in appearance, there was a little bit of grain left in the bite. Graininess became less relevant when the cheese was melted on the pizza. At least this cheese melted unlike the NASA rubber experiment that resulted form my first home cheesemaking attempt. I called it a partial success and a good lesson in what to change next time.

I'm in Ur Kitchin, Makin Ur Curdz

While I let various iterations of the future of Cheesy Street steep in my brain during my Texas cheese limbo, I'm grasping at ways to stay motivated, connected, and focused. Shipping off to Waco one day a week to make cheese has alleviated some of my lethargy. At the very least, it's removed a large chunk of free time where I would be otherwise brooding on my what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life confusion. Minus travel time, that still leaves 5 full days to play with. I'm slowly training myself to start every morning with some educational reading from the array of cheese books I've collected over time -- treating every morning as if I was studying for the bar exam again. This time the cheese bar. Reading chapters of The Cheese Primer is far less mindbendingly painful than practicing essay answers on the priority of claims under the Uniform Commercial Code.

Oh hai, can I offer you cheese?

My newest project is finally making cheese at home. This is usually a first step for hardcore cheese enthusiasts, and one that I should have tried sooner. I was one of only two students in my first cheese school class in Vermont who had never experimented making their own cheese in the kitchen. Almost a full year later, sure, I've made giant batches of cheese by recipe and under varying degrees of supervision. Yet, I've never attempted to muddle through the process on my own. Find and buy my own cultures. Research recipes. Figure out what can go wrong and why.

At first, I will be limited by a few things. Raw milk sale is legal in Texas. But Texas is big. Oh and I'm practically in Mexico. The dairies that sell raw milk aren't widespread or nearby. I've had enough of driving hours and hours to get what I need. At least at the outset, I will settle for store-bought, pasteurized, roughly-handled milk that will affect the success and flavor of the recipes. Maybe if I start to get better at this or more adventurous, I'll travel to a dairy farm to pick up some fresh milk and re-unite with my love for baby cows. Also, I don't have an aging cave. Most home cheesemakers can outfit a basic wine cooler or mini-fridge to serve the same purposes. I'm not ready to make that investment until I know I'm not ruining every batch or cooking up a disgusting mess. So, for now, I will primarily be making fresh cheeses, basic cheese curds, and yogurt.

Second cheese heats while
 first cheese presses

My first attempt was a batch of cheese curds that we could hopefully eat salted, seasoned or fried. The make process is very similar to what I've been describing to date, but on a smaller scale. I heat the milk in a stock pot on my stove, add cultures and rennet by teaspoons, cut the curd with a kitchen knife, stir, and drain the whey in a basic colander. No giant wheels of cheese here yet, so the hooped curds don't go into big molds. But I do press them lightly in the colander using a jug of milk (approximately 8 pounds) to further some whey release.

Kitchen cheesemaking is not as fast and easy as I assumed. First step is cleaning. Keeping my kitchen completely sanitary is futile. I try to wipe, clean and sanitize as much as possible. But my kitchen isn't the sterile haven of most cheese rooms. I'm not that concerned for the time being because I'm working with pasteurized milk in small private batches. For now, if anyone gets violently ill, it will be either me or Tad. My intestines are prepared for battle. Keeping the temperature in my stock pot constant is also much trickier than using a cheese vat. I'm constantly shifting the temperature settings on my electric burners. I imagine with practice I'll have a better idea of how the heating elements work. For now, the make involved ten-minute intervals between wide-eyed shrieks at the thermometer and violent back and forth flinging of the burner dial.

Hooping

So much destroyed potential

I'll blame the stove for its temperature spikes, but it was likely my own fault for stirring the curd a few minutes too long. Either because it was too hot or cooked for too long, the curd turned out rubbery and dry. My first bite was underwhelming and alarmingly squeaky. After I salted them, the curds saw their first use as topping on hot soup for dinner that night...and they didn't melt. What the hell kind of cheese doesn't melt?! They just stayed solid, squeaky balls. Softer. But unmoved in their refusal to melt. I like my cheese melted and completely covering other food items, so I was disappointed. During the make, the curd felt moist and perfect in my hands. Sometimes, however, a small mistake in the recipe is not very noticeable until the final product. I played it fast and loose with my milk and learned my lesson. I abandoned my first trial to the depths of the fridge. I think Tad used them once or twice and claimed they were delicious on salad. But I was unmoved in my refusal to accept them as a cheese I'd want to eat.

Thermophilic culture and calcium
chloride (helps store-bought milk coagulate)

Another issue for which I really can't be blamed is the flavor. Most flavor development in cheese comes from the starter cultures and their role in the aging process. Plus, I don't have the facilities to age anything. The cultures for the curd were a very basic thermophilic culture. Even my home mozzarella recipe that I would be trying soon simply uses citric acid, not bacterial cultures, to drop the pH. Neither will add much flavor to the final product. So, the cheese I make in the kitchen sort of just taste likes mildly sweet, cooked store-bought milk. When I get bolder with the cultures and rig up an aging apparatus, my cheese should take on a more interesting flavor.

Watchin some football,
hangin some cheese.

I moved on the next day to Fromage Blanc, which is a soft, tangy fresh cheese. It can be flavored as either savory or sweet and have uses comparable to a spreadable cream cheese. This cheese is not cooked. Also, it would require much longer make and draining times. Fromage blanc takes up to 12 hours to fully coagulate because there is less rennet activity. At that point, the curd is simply scooped, not cut. The ladled curd is placed in a butter muslin or cheese cloth to hang for another 6 to 12 hours, depending on desired moisture and consistency.

Fromage blanc curd

The fromage blanc was a success. I drained it for a little over 12 hours and periodically shifted and squeezed the bags to drain a little more moisture. The final product was a thick, tangy, creamy spread that I used on sandwiches with tomato, basil and pepper. For a sweeter version I spread it on angel food cake, topped with caramel and strawberries. In your face, failed cheese curd!

Next up in the kitchen: mozzarella and yogurt.