Moonflower Make, Thermophillic Culture

I got to make moonflower today which is a semi-hard cheese with a mild washed rind flavor. On this make we use a thermophillic culture which grows best at a temperature ranging from 95 to 113 and has a maximum of 140. This class of cultures is best for cooked pressed cheese because they are heat tolerant, but is also used in some soft cheeses to produce a substance called exopolysaccharide (EPS) which prevents the paste (interior) from becoming to runny. Thermophillic culture is also used in other dairy products such as yogurt and buttermilk.

So we add our culture at 95, wait half an hour, rennet, then wait 45 minutes as the cheese sets. After cutting we cook the cheese up to 102 over half an hour. This involves draining out the 125 degree water and adding 165, to slowly raise the temp while stirring. We then drain the water from the jacket and drain the whey from the vat. The curd is hooped into our Kadova molds and pressed for 4-5 hours or overnight. In the cave this cheese takes out its washed rind character from the Brevibacterium linens (b. linens) bacteria which grow on it forming a beautiful slimy orange blanket. Ill explain this in greater detail as I get into the nitty gritty of the aging room in a later entry. Suffice it to say this is an excellent cheese with a mild washed rind flavor with nutty nuances on top of that unique creamy sheep milk background.

Peter Dixon cheese class day 2

We started the day by going up to the creamery and taking a look at the lactic acid cheese we had cultured and renneted yesterday. It was fairly hard, we began ladling it into cheesecloth bags which we hung inside pots and let drain. The ladling is the cut in this case, you take a little scoop and plop it in the bag, cutting the curd into 2-4 inch disks 1/2 inch thick. When then went back down the hill to have a discussion of the stage of cheesemaking referred to as setting, which consists of ripening and coagulation. Ripening is the period after culture has been added and LAB's begin converting lactose into lactic acid.

Coagulation takes place after rennet has been added and consists of two stages: enzymatic and aggregation with the intermediary time refereed to as flocculation. In the enzymatic stage Rennet cleaves off Kappa hairs off casein sub micelles turning changing them from a polar to non-polar molecule. This allows casein sub micelles, which constitute 75% of the protein in milk, to aggregate into micelles. The period between the enzymatic and aggregation stages is refereed to as flocculation and timing this is crucial to deciding when to do your cut. Peter showed us the "spinny test" in which an floating object (bottle cap) is placed on the milk and spun. When it will not spin freely aggregation has been reached. You take your floc time and multiple it by 3 for sheep, 3.5 for goat or cow and then you wait that long until you cut, for lactic cheeses. for harder cheeses you multiple by 2, for alpines 1.5 as you want softer curd to cut smaller curds.

A discussion of rennet followed. Rennet consists of 2 enzymes: chymozin and pepsin. chymozin is the superior high quality enzyme and pepsin the inferior because it encourage protealysis, the breakdown of protein. There are 4 types of rennet: Calf and plant which are the originals with calf being much better as it has a lot of chymozin and little pepsin, microbial, and GMO. Microbial and GMO are the moderns, micro has a good balance and is equal to calf and GMO is pure chymozin. Rennet is temp dependent and the optimum temp for its activity is 104F, above this it breaks down. In parm the rennet is broken down by heat but plasmin does the work or residual rennet, creating peptides. The lower the PH, the more residual rennet. With sheep milk you use less rennet than with cow and goat.

The discussion of rennet brings us back full circle to the setting stage. A divide is formed here: Lactic curd cheeses use very little rennet and set overnight, the final PH falling to around 4.5. Rennet curd cheeses use enough rennet to set within 1/2 hour to 45 minutes and have a final PH of 5.4 to 4.7. Rennet curds are more workable, shrink faster, expel more whey, and hold their shape. Lactic curds are fragile and hold water well. There are some hybrids such as Chaource and aged chevre which fall somewhere in between but always start as lactics. There are also the exceptions of heat precipitated curd cheeses which are heated up to 185 the acidified directly with vinegar or citrus. Examples of this type are panir, queso blanco, and ricotta.

After lunch we made three cheese: Gouda, Feta, and Tomme. The Gouda was a washed curd and took a much longer time then the others. Feta is uncooked and unpressed besides the weight of the baskets. This gives it the open texture you expect from this style. After filling the basket hoops we flipped it every 15 minutes. The Tomme we cooked and pressed. This cheese set much faster than the others because it was raised to 90 degrees, displaying how temp affects rennet activity. We hooped this cheese in the whey which will give it a closed texture. This style is traditionally pre-pressed by placing a weight on top of the hoops. Making these three cheeses side by side showed us how very similar makes will end up with very different cheese depending on what you do after the make. There was a good variety, a washed curd, a unpressed uncooked, and a cooked pressed. Although they always say the cheese is made in the vat and i agree with this, what makes the difference between styles is to a great degree determined by what you do after this step with only slight differences in the make.

Peter Dixon cheese class day 1

First day of three day workshop with Peter Dixon here at Monkeyflower ranch. Peter is a badass cheese consultant who operates Consider Bardwell farm in Vermont. They have turned a New England bank barn into a cheesemaking/aging facility, with a loading dock and milking parlor. Peter has been involved in multiple cheesemaking operations including Shelbourne farms which makes cheddar and Vermont butter and cheese company. He has traveld in Albania and Macedonia with a grant from land o lakes and shared some amazing stories with us including one about an albanian cheesemaker who did not use cultures, instead let the milk sit out over night and naturally ferment.

The whole drive of Peter's lectures was 1st that good cheese comes from good milk, 2nd a balance between hygiene and biodivesity is crucial, and 3rd that making cheese is the smallest part of having a farmstead cheese operation. The paramount importance of good milk means that what the animals are eating is the largest factor in final outcome. He outlined this with a feed pyramid showing the finest cheeses coming from native pastured animals, below this seeded pastures, then dry hay, followed by the less desirable fermeneted wrapped bales and finally corn and grass silage. Silage is corn or grass that has been packed without proper drying and allowed to ferment, partially digesting it and creating bacteria which compete with LAB's. Farmstead cheeses tend to be superior because the milk has not traveled very far meaning it hasn't been jostled which breaks down protein chains or left out for bad stuff to grow.

By balance between hygiene and biodiversity he means you let nature do its things with as little tampering as possible. So using wood in an aging facility is less sanitary but is prefered because a biofilm will grow on wood which will encourage growth of beneficial molds and wood will balance moisture and temp fluctuation through evaporatation cooling. Raw milk is an ecosystem of beneficial bacterias that must be preserved as it goes through the transformative processes of harvesting, handling, cheesemaking, and affinage. The doctrine of sterilty upheld by the regulatory process is often at odds with this concept of cheese as an ecosystem.

The third major point made on this first day was that the making of cheese is a minor part of a farmstead cheese operation. The difficult and time consuming sectors are farming and marketing/distribution of the cheese. The care of animals and land takes up much more time than actual cheesemaking/aging. Most farmstead cheesemakers find the business aspects the most difficult aspects. This something worth thinking about and makes me realize that studying business is a really good idea and would be more applicable to what I want to do than food science.

So on to more nuts and bolts. When discussing pastuerizing versus raw Peter came down squarely in favor of raw but explained some key differences. Pastuerizing traps more moisture giving a higher yield but making the moisture harder to remove. This is due to more calcium ion bonding under heat. HTST is actually preferable to LTST because there is less denaturing of the milk. If you go above 175 however there is damage which makes it hard 2 get a good curd formation. Peter made a very good point that it is valuable to learn the Pasturized Milk Ordinance because this is the text the inspectors use and we should get to know it.

We spent alot of time this first day going over the microbiology of milk. Peter diagramed different results of lacto-fermentations tests in which milk is put in a sterile test tube at 90-95 degrees F then allowed to sit overnight. If there is some seperation and a little bit of bubbles this is great, there are LABS. The bubbles are CO2 formed by Propionic bacterias which can form eyes in cheese and come traditionally from animals grazing on legumes. If there are numerous large holes, a sponge-like apperance and lots of whey means coliform bacteria, definetly not good. If there is fleecy curd that hangs from the sides of the tube with strands and copious whey you have psychotrophic bacteria which grow in cold milk. You can still make aged cheeses with this, just not fresh.

My New Home!!

I just arrived here this evening and got moved into one of three rooms in an apartment within a farm house in royal oaks California, outside Watsonville which is near Santa Cruz.  The Ranch consists of 40 acres on hilly terrain about 7 miles from the coast.    This place is incredible and I know I'm going to love it here. There are pigs, goats, ducks, chickens, cats, and dogs along with a grip load of Sheep.  My housemates are Jess who works at Happy Boy produce doing farmers markets and Rebecca who runs Garden Variety Cheese.