So You Want to Make Cheese TODAY

So You Want to Make Cheese TODAY!

You have your equipment, rennet, cultures and citric acid, a kit and directions - BUT

unfortunately, there is NO brand of pasteurized drinking milk in the St. Louis, MO area suitable for cheesemaking, and NONE of them will stretch for mozzarella.  OK, is this clear?  "Low temperature pasteurized" will NOT work.  "Regular" pasteurized will NOT work.  Ultra-pasteurized will NOT work. 

Even though your directions or kit lead you to believe you can use pasteurized, homogenized milk from a store for cheesemaking and mozzarella, I can only guess that must refer to milk from a store in some other state far away from here.  Milk sold for drinking, in St. Louis, MO, is all pasteurized at 170 F or higher, rendering it unable to coagulate firmly, stretch, or drain. 

That includes the "low temperature pasteurized" brand - it will NOT work for cheesemaking.  (We just tried it in our class on Nov. 7, to see if the new labeling meant different processing - sure enough it failed again).  The milk in the outer area of the equipment, the part in touch with the heating section, hits very high temperatures even though the overall vat stays at 155 or lower.  The particles of milk which were overheated make the whole batch UNSUITABLE for cheesemaking.  (In the same way when you cook a pot of soup, the bottom layer next to the flame becomes extra hot, but the entire batch reaches just the right temperature.  For soup, that's ok.  For cheesemaking purposes, the milk has been ruined.)

Luckily, if you want to make cheese, RAW MILK will work, and of course is the traditional milk always used for cheesemaking in all of human history until about the 1930's and later in the USA.  For sources check www.realmilk.com or www.localharvest.org .  Also, the "Local Harvest Grocery Store" and "Tower Grove Farmer's Market" are possible sources of raw milk in St. Louis. 

Also, on www.cheesemaking.com (Ricki Carroll's site), there's a method for using powdered dry milk, plus cream, for making mozzarella, which she says works well.

(Luckily, if you want to make YOGURT, buttermilk, sour cream, or RICOTTA, any brand WILL work.  For yogurt, you don't seek a firm curd, and for ricotta, you will heat the milk past pasteurization temperatures anyway.)

Of course you are aware that there are wonderful pasteurized-milk cheeses.  This is possible because the cheesemakers have carefully pasteurized their milk using special equipment which does NOT overheat the milk.  Those cheesemakers are NOT using milk bought in a store which was pasteurized for drinking purposes, and neither can you.

By the way, it's completely legal to buy raw milk in Missouri, under Mo. Statute 196.935, which states:  "an individual may buy and have delivered, for his own use, raw milk and cream from a farm."  That's pretty simple to understand in plain English.

I get a lot of phone calls about this, that's why I have written this note.  Cheesemaking involves using only one basic ingredient, milk.  Succeed - use the right kind of milk.

Aug. 25, 2010

Merryl Winstein