Cheese update

So we tried the marinated feta on New Years Eve, and sadly it was not that good. It was certainly cheese like, but the flavour was completely overwhelmed by the taste of the olive oil. Which probably goes to show that a)the cheese was a bit bland b) the cheese was a bit soft and soaked up more of the oil than it should have c) I shouldn’t have used such a strongly flavoured oil.

So I had another crack at cheese making the weekend before I went back to work. This time I used whole milk, made sure I picked the freshest in the fridge and used it a day earlier than I did the last lot. I also only added half the acid that I did for the first batch (you might recall that I thought the last batch had issues from being too acidic).

The nice thing about using whole milk instead of skim is that you get a much larger ‘yield’ – more cheese for the same amount of milk. Using the same amount of milk this time I got a cheese that looked like this:

This time the curd set more like it was supposed to – in a nice smooth lump. However the curds were a lot wetter when I drained and pressed them, and after the initial draining what was coming out was not whey but milk. The cheese continued to ooze milk after pressing, which was kind of disconcerting.

In other words, the milk was not acidic enough, and not all of it was coagulated properly. More experimentation is clearly in order. However, probably not until after we’ve moved.