Brie - revision #3

Now that I have a dedicated cheese cave that Santa so generously gave me this past Christmas, I took another chance with brie (or cambembert, or more generally a white mold rennetted cheese).  I made this on 3/16/11 with 1 gallon TJ's organic whole milk, 1 pint of TJ's organic heavy cream, flora danica (thanks to my aunt for christmas as well), CaCl, and rennet.  My molding process definitely could use some improved hardware, but I managed to create 3 small disks and two spheres.  They dried in their moulds, were salted, and sat for a bit more on the kitchen counter at room temp in a plastic box for about 4 days.  Now they reside in their cozy cheese cave (aka tiny wine cooler).

Here they are at 1 week old (temp at about 48* F and humidity too low at around 82%).

Since the humidity should be more like 90%, I put a star-san soaked paper towel on the bottom.  After a couple days, I didn't see the humidity rise, so I added more star-san to it, and added another wadded-up star-san soaked paper towel to the shelf with the spheres.  Hopefully that does the trick.  The white mold seems to be starting to grow, so maybe it's just fine... I just want to make sure the white mold gets happy and makes some creamy gooey brie!

We'll see how they turn out in 4 or 5 more weeks.  I figure the small sphere might be worth checking soon - have it on my calendar for April 6.  The others should probably go to April 20 or 27 - again, I put it in my calendar so I don't forget.

Cheese Failure #2 and #3

I finally had a chance to check out the cheeses I made a few months ago. They never looked like they were aging well, so my hopes weren't too high. As I figured, they didn't taste very well. The blue might have been salvagable, but the brie certainly wasn't. Amazingly, the textures were spot-on, though. I guess I should be happy about that.

I didn't take any photos, because they were just too scary. I just dumped them as quickly as I could after cutting into them and taking a small taste of each... then washing my mouth with a bit of tequila to kill any scary stuff! I guess it worked, I'm not sick today. Whew.

I think the mistakes could be attributed to two things: 1. I didn't drain the cheeses long enough after they set, and 2. they got too hot about a week into the ripening stage.

This probably caused: 1. the blue to still be losing moisture after three months, and the molds to not grow properly, and 2. killing off the molds before they really had a chance, and to ripen too quickly too early.

If I am going to be successful with this cheese thing, I really do need better facilities, and better temperature control. Our house is just not set up well for making cheese (or beer, for that matter), and we don't have room for another fridge dedicated to cheese. Funny, our last house had both. Go figure.

First Brie Cheese

This Saturday (Jan. 23) I made three little brie's! I think they'll be a lot easier than the bleu, but maybe more of a crapshoot whether they turn out or not.

The curds didn't form as I expected or had seen in the past - more like a ricotta break. So I added more rennett and cooked a little more (with temps ending up higher than I wanted again). Still no good break, so I probably overcooked them (again making it drier than ideal?). Overall, as you can see in the photo, they did come out of the moulds okay (speaking of which, I made moulds from cut-up 2-liter soda bottles and they worked pretty well). I tasted them this morning and it was more of a chevre consistency - sort of reflects the ricotta-type "curd" break. Recipe for all three included 1 gallon of whole milk plus a quart of whipping cream. Maybe the whipping cream is what did it? Both were just pasteurized (not ultra).