welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen today we are going to continue
our exploration of cheese making and she's making is something that I'm just
sort of exploring at this point so so far in the channel we made ricotta we
made cottage cheese and squeaky cheese curds and they all turned out really
well and they're all fairly simple recipes for cheese that you can do at
home today we're going to make cream cheese which again seems to be a fairly
simple process so I've got a heavy cast-iron pot here a Dutch oven on sort
of medium low heat because I want to heat up all of the milk to about 86
degrees Fahrenheit and this milk has a plug on the top so this is non
homogenized and it is 4.8% milk fat it's pasteurized but not homogenized and
there is that cream plug at the top absolutely amazing let me get a knife
and see if I can get that out okay let's try the end of spoon Oh wonderful
okay look at that cream on the top absolutely incredible okay so this is
the last of the milk now about the milk I have got the highest fat milk that I
could find easily I'm pretty sure that I could have gotten a little bit more fat
in the milk if I'd looked harder so we still need to add a little bit of fat
and I'm gonna do that with this whipping cream so just a little bit of whipping
cream and this should give us all the fat that we need in order to get a
really nice creamy cream cheese so I got this was non homogenized but it was
pasteurized but not ultra-high temperature pasteurized so there's
there's a couple of different ways of pasteurizing milk that are in use in
North America and one is sort of the traditional pasteurization temperature
which is somewhere around 160 161 degrees Fahrenheit
at that temperature it renders the milk safe but it also screws up the milk
proteins a little bit not too much but still screws them up a little bit which
isn't very noticeable for most applications now you get into ultra high
temperature pasteurized milk where they heat it up even further and it
completely screws up the protein structure of the milk and if you're just
putting milk in your coffee or on your cereal or I don't know just sort of
general use around your house you're never gonna notice but for this
process you don't want to get ultra-high temperature pasteurized milk because the
proteins will be too screwed up when you go to do this process so take a look at
the milk carton and try to get milk that is an ultra high temperature pasteurized
and the reason they do this ultra-high temperature pasteurization is so that
the the milk lasts longer at the supermarket doesn't spoil as quickly and
I got to tell you 90 percent of the time you're not going to notice the cream
however you're probably in North America again generally speaking always
exceptions to this you're probably only going to be able to get ultra-high
temperature pasteurized cream and you'll notice on all of the cartons for the UHT
pasteurized cream that they've had to add stuff into it because you've screwed
up the proteins and it doesn't react the way that it's supposed to so they add
stuff like carrageenan and cellulose gum in order to thicken it up so that it
reacts the way that it's supposed to and we're not looking for any proteins out
of this cream we're just looking for the fat so that doesn't matter so much there
is one brand that's available to me here where I live that is just regular
pasteurized but it's like four times the price and I didn't want to go that route
okay let's check the temperature we're trying to get to a six degrees
Fahrenheit just give it a little bit of a swirl we shouldn't be very close now
we're still around seven so we've still got a little ways to go
now this is an induction cooktop and I've got fairly precise control over how
quickly it heats in the temperature that it reaches if I was doing this inside on
the gas stove or with one of the round coil
stoves I would probably use a bomber II just so
that I didn't overshoot the temperature too far you don't really want to go too
far beyond 86 and you sort of want it at 86 to 84 or 84 degrees Fahrenheit to 86
so that you don't kill the culture that we're going to put in and this is a
lactobacillus culture and the lactobacillus culture is going to give
us a tangy flavor sort of develop a nice deep rich flavour to the cheese rather
than just having the fat flavor so as this warms up one of the other
things that we need to add is calcium chloride and calcium chloride is is put
in and there's not very much quarter-teaspoon
and we put that in to sort of overcome the well not sort of to overcome the
problems that you have from using pasteurized milk remember I said that
the the proteins are screwed up a little bit this will help it to coagulate and
and reach that curd stage that you really need when we add the rennet in so
let's just wait for this to heat up and then we'll move on to the next step
let's check the temperature see where we're at 87 a blue passed by one degree
so I'm just going to stir it a little bit when degrees not too bad as I move
this around sort of fluctuates between 86 and 87 so I think we're okay
now we're gonna add in this lactobacillus culture and this culture
in particular is one that it's the same mix of lactobacillus bacteria that is
used to make buttermilk if you live in North America the buttermilk you're
buying at the store is cultured it's not actually what's left over from the
process of making butter originally it would have been but sometime around
World War one they just stopped doing that and so of course there's exceptions
and I'm sure that somebody's going to know the exception of where you can buy
real buttermilk but if you're buying buttermilk in the store it is usually
skim milk one scent that has this culture put in it
and this culture thickens it up a little bit and causes that tangy acidic flavor
that you would have gotten from the actual liquid left over from butter
making it's complicated it really is shouldn't be but it is so
I've got the culture and I just sprinkle it over top I don't want to stir it in
yet I want it to soften in the milk so I'm gonna leave it for about five
minutes before I stir it in that will apparently keep it from clumping
allowing you to get a good mix throughout the liquid and next in is
rent it and this is animal rennet now the rennet is what sets the proteins
and causes everything to coagulate together or thicken and for this amount
of milk it's somewhere between four and six drops so one two three four and
let's do five just for good measure now we'll stir to combine this all
together now you want to give this a really good stir make sure it's all
mixed together make sure that the culture and the rennet are everywhere in
the milk and I've read a whole bunch of different things about stirring
technique there is stirring technique in every kitchen operation and usually you
stir around in a whirlpool for this I've been told a kind of an up and down
motion is what you're looking for everywhere in the pot now that's it for
today that's it for today I'm gonna put the lid on this I'm going to keep it in
the kitchen warm I'm gonna keep the kitchen at a temperature that's a little
bit higher than normal probably around 74 degrees Fahrenheit and this will sit
at room temperature 74 75 for the next 12 to 24 hours you won't do anything to
it and it's okay that it's going to drop from that 86 down to about 74 or 75
that's fine we'll come back tomorrow and we'll look
at it and I'll tell you the signs that you're looking for before we move on to
the next step okay about 16 hours have gone by it's
time to move on to the next step and there's a couple ways that you can tell
one is just by smell it has a very sort of bright acidic smell and you can tell
that the bacteria have done their job the second way is that you'll notice if
you tip it or you look really closely there's a layer of liquid way on top it
has started to weep and it's also started to pull away from the sides of
the pan that lets you know that the curd is set and the whey is starting to drain
and draining all of that way is the next step and so I've got a call under here
set inside a bowl to catch the way and I've also got some cheesecloth and this
is a really good-quality cheesecloth a lot of people might call it a butter
muslin has a very tight fine weave the stuff that you get at the grocery store
or at the hardware store the weave is probably too loose to actually do what
you want to do now you just take a slotted spoon and you sort of very
carefully grab the curd and move it over and I suppose you could pour it out but
everything I've read says to very carefully sort of move it over I'll
probably have to pour it at the end now we just let this drain for about two
hours and of your way reaches the bottom of the colander of course pour it off so
my understanding in this instance can't be used to make ricotta it's too acidic
apparently so I'm not going to try and do that but I am gonna take a little
spoonful of this and give it a taste let's see how we're doing here mmm
that's quite nice I'm so a little bit of an acidic Tang not too acidic not overly
funky on the flavor and my understanding is that that flavour will continue to
develop as it drains and as it hangs in the next step because we're still
probably 24 hours away from this being cream cheese
two hours have gone by and a lot of whey has drained out of this cheese so at
this point I just need to gather up the four corners and we're
going to hang this for another twelve to twenty hours and two or three times
during that 12 to 20 hours I'm gonna take it down open it up and give it a
stir and during the last stir I'm gonna add a little bit of salt and that's
going to both flavor the cheese and help release that last bit of way now I just
need to figure out how to hang this up here let's see what I can do
okay so c-stands aren't really kitchen equipment but they are so very handy
I'll see you in another 12 to 24 hours hey Jules hey we finally get to have
some of this I feel like I've been staring at this on the counter or
literally hanging around so this is day I did three day three okay a three day
three I just got the don't touch this message up in the counter it's a very
time-consuming what not not time to see just takes time you just have to wait
for it to happen technically not very difficult
okay it's got a nice that tart creamy it's got it yeah I'm just gonna eat it
straight up just to see I think I could've put a little more salt in at
the end so that that end part where it was hanging I you stir it a few times
you let it drain longer you let it drain the stiffer it becomes okay so I've this
one is still pretty spreadable it's got a lovely texture though lovely creamy
texture it's got that Tang from yeah which is nice I probably would have put
in a little bit more salt but that's something that you have to play with as
you I mean it's the first time I ever inspect if you really wanted more salt
you could just just put a little bit on
well I think that's really good cream cheese it is really good cream cheese
it's a lot of cream cheese though I don't know that we're gonna unless we
make something with this item yeah we're gonna use that fast enough so that's a
cute low I got a kilo of cream cheese out of what
we started with we ended up with a kilo of cream cheese a lot of cream cheese um
you could make it with less but it would still take the same amount of time is it
worth it from the standpoint of learning how it's made and being an all-star
after the zombie apocalypse cuz you know how to make cream cheese yes I think
it's worth I think it's worth it to understand where your food comes from
what am I gonna whip this up next time I want to make a cheesecake or just have
it in the it might be something you make and share amongst a group of you special
occasions yeah I think it's a worthwhile project but I don't know that it's
something that I will do on a regular basis but it is really good so I think
we'll make a cheesecake or something with it I'm gonna look up a bunch of
bunch of recipes that use cream cheese and look out for those over the next
little while what's cream cheese really common in the
thirties staple I'm gonna take a look I have no idea things to learn yeah so um
give cream cheese a try if you are on your exploring food thank you got three
days and you've got three days and you don't need a whole lot of tools it
doesn't take a lot of tools or knowledge patience patience thanks
for stopping by see you again soon
you