Yodelay-hee-hoo

Why did I make Swiss cheese last Friday?

Well, now that my camemberts are slumbering quietly, growing their fur coats and gathering their strength, I needed a new project. I thought that the production of a hard cheese would provide the sort of novel challenge one wants in a day off work and an interesting contrast to my mold-ripened beauties of last weekend.

But mostly, I made Swiss cheese because I wanted to see what would happen. I mean, haven't you ever wondered about all those holes?

It started off much like my other cheese to date except that instead of my usual temperate mesofilics I used heat-loving thermofilic bugs. I also added a new culture to the ripening milk: Proprionic Shermanii, respiration of which (if I'm not mistaken and all goes well) will blow bubbles in my cheese in a couple of weeks' time.

I am now a dab hand at testing the cut ...

... and slicing the curds. Since my Swiss cheese will age much longer than my camembert, the curds needed to be cut smaller and cooked longer and at a higher temperature (for dry-ification purposes) than previously.


Initial slicing: my biggest wire whisk worked a treat.

The curds got smaller ...

... and smaller.

I held them at 90 deg F for 40 minutes,
foreworking them to expel the whey.

Then came a new step: I slowly heated the mixture up to 120 deg F, stirring all the while to keep the curds from clumping. At 113 deg F, the curds started to feel a strong attraction to one another, the sort of behavior I needed to discourage if I was to have any success in my endeavour. My stirring became a two-handed effort: with my right hand I continued to keep things moving with my slotted spoon; my left arm I plunged elbow-deep into the pot so I could break up the curds with my fingers. If I hadn't seen the meister employing this technique I would not have had the nerve to do it myself.

In the end I said to hell with it and got in there with both hands. It was lovely and warm although I discovered later in the evening that the highly-corrosive whey did disastrous things to the delicate lady-like skin on my knuckles.

After forty-six minutes, the temperature had reached the required 120 deg F and my curds looked like fluffy popcorn:

Now for the final cooking! Twenty minutes after I'd reached my target temp, I judged I had the proper break: the curds broke apart into pieces when I rubbed them purposefully between my palms. The cheesy bits were squeaky and tasty, if a bit bland at this point.

I packed them into my cloth-lined mold ...

... and considered how I was going to press them without the traditional paraphrenalia. Fortunately, I had a variety of workout weights at my disposal, courtesy of Sir:

I used one of them to apply my initial load of eight pounds.

After fifteen minutes of pressure, I unmolded the cheese. It didn't break into a million pieces or stick to the cloth!

I flipped it, re-wrapped it, and popped it back into the mold. I applied fourteen pounds of weight for the next 45 minutes and when, at that interval's end, I examined the cheese, I found it had already changed dramatically in appearance:

I really felt like I was getting somewhere! A flip and a wrap and two more hours to go at fourteen pounds. I waited expectantly.

The result was thrilling: an object that looked positively cheese-like and had a lovely tangy aroma. The surface was nice and smooth (except where my cloth had overlapped in the mold) with no cracks or unsightly blemishes:

By now it was extremely late and time to tuck my cheese into bed for the night. For this stage, it required fifteen pounds of pressure, which for exercise-related reasons I was unable to provide with fewer than three weights. This led to a general kerfuffle and a loud crash twenty minutes later as my jury-rigged press went thundering to the floor from atop the kitchen counter.

The next iteration lasted almost two hours before collapsing, scaring the cat into bristle-tailed hysterics and bringing me careening downstairs in a state of high alarm at ten minutes to midnight. Finally, Sir and I were able to engineer a setup we thought would last the night:

It did.

The next morning I was thrilled at what I found when I unmolded the youngest of my kinder:

Next up: my cheese takes a bath